Departments and Institutes
Research Interests
Slavery, race relations and gender in the American South between the seventeenth- and the early nineteenth century.
Research Supervision
My present research students are working on the following topics: John Witherspoon and the Scottish Enlightenment in America; Trade and gift-giving between the English colonists and Native Americans on the mid-eighteenth century Southern frontier; Leisure-time pursuits of enslaved people in the antebellum American South; The culture of enslaved people in the antebellum American South; Women in the management of eighteenth- and early nineteenth century Jamaican sugar plantations; and Secular protest in seventeenth-century New England.
Teaching
Seventeenth and eighteenth-century history of British America, with a particular emphasis on slavery and gender.
Key Publications
- Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730-1775 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984)
- Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia, 1750-1830 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995)
- The Origins of American Slavery: The English Colonies, 1607-1700 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997)
- with Sylvia R. Frey, Come Shouting to Zion: African-American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
- co-ed. with Sylvia R. Frey, The Atlantic World: From Slavery to Emancipation (London: Frank Cass, 1999)
- Gender, Race and Rank in a Revolutionary Age: The Georgia Lowcountry, 1750-1820 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000)
- ed., 'The Letters of Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedekne, 1765-1775,' in Travel, Trade and Power in the Atlantic, 1765-1884 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
- Slavery in Colonial America, 1619-1775 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005)
- ed., Mary Telfair to Mary Few: Selected Letters, 1802-1844, Southern Texts Society (forthcoming, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007)