Jennifer L. Morgan

Life Morgan graduated from Oberlin College in 1986 with a BA in Third World Studies, a self-designed major. She has credited much of her later academic success to Adrienne Lash Jones, Oberlin's third tenured Black professor and the first tenured Black professor in the Africana studies department.

Morgan's first book, Laboring Women, was published in 2004. It discusses the experiences of enslaved women in colonial Barbados and South Carolina, including how enslavers exploited the reproduction of enslaved women to grow their labor force.

As of 2024, Morgan is working on a third book, The Eve of Slavery, which will examine "African women in seventeenth-century North America," including the story of Elizabeth Key, an enslaved woman who successfully sued for her freedom.

Publications

Books Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016), co-editor Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021)

Articles

Chapters