The University of Georgia Press announces a new book series which will examine the intersection of gender and slavery in history. Groundbreaking in its scope, the Gender and Slavery series will explore the gendered experience of enslavement in the New World, covering both the Americas and the West Indies.

The series editors, Daina Ramey Berry (University of Texas) and Jennifer L. Morgan (NYU), seek new scholarship on slavery from diverse fields including but not limited to women’s and gender studies, manhood and masculinity studies, African American and Atlantic World history, American Studies, and literature, with close attention paid to analytic themes that engage larger fields: labor, expressive culture, intimate relations, resistance, reproduction, and production.

Extending beyond binaries of house/field or urban/rural, this transnational series will encompass the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and focus primarily on the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch-speaking diaspora. The editors encourage submissions that draw on comparative aspects of this history as well as micro- and macro- studies of gender and slavery.

“Given the explosion of scholarship on gender and slavery as well as the increasing visibility of slavery in popular culture, this timely series allows us to take stock of the field while offering fresh interpretations of a much contested topic,” said Berry, an associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies and the George W. Littlefield Fellow in American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Berry is a specialist in the history of gender and slavery in the United States with a particular emphasis on the social and economic history of the nineteenth century. She is the author of Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia; editor-in-chief of Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia; and co-editor with Leslie M. Harris of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia, 2014).

“The series marks an exciting moment in the scholarship on slavery and freedom, one in which work on gender is moving the field forward in profound and generative ways,” said Morgan, a professor of social and cultural analysis and history and chair of social and cultural analysis at New York University.

Morgan’s areas of research include early African American history, the history of the Black Atlantic, histories of racial ideology, and women and gender. She is the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery and co-editor with Jennifer Brier and James Downs of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America.

Of the series, UGA Press Director Lisa Bayer said, “We are excited to launch this rigorous, interdisciplinary series that marks a new turn in the study of gender and slavery and offers cutting-edge resources for scholars and students.”