NYU Historian Jennifer L. Morgan wins 2024 MacArthur “Genius Grant”

(Press-News.org) New York University historian Jennifer L. Morgan, whose work focuses on the institutionalization of race-based slavery in early America and the Black Atlantic, has been named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

MacArthur Fellows are recipients of the foundation’s “genius grants,” who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to pursue intellectual, social, and artistic endeavors.

“The 2024 MacArthur Fellows pursue rigorous inquiry with aspiration and purpose,” says MacArthur Fellows Director Marlies Carruth. “They expose biases built into emerging technologies and social systems and fill critical gaps in the knowledge of cycles that sustain life on Earth. Their work highlights our shared humanity, centering the agency of disabled people, the humor and histories of Indigenous communities, the emotional lives of adolescents, and perspectives of rural Americans.”

Morgan, a professor in NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and Department of History, chronicles enslaved African women’s experiences during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing that their exploitation was central to the economic and ideological foundations of slavery in the Atlantic world. 

In her first book, Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Morgan shows that enslavement was fundamentally different for women because they were expected to both perform agricultural fieldwork and produce children, who were born into enslavement. In Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021), Morgan explores the emergence of both racial slavery and capitalism—a crucial moment in world history because, she says, “I think we very much are living in its legacy today.”

Morgan, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and a PhD in history from Duke University, co-edited Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and her articles have been published in several journals, including History of the Present, the William and Mary Quarterly, and Small Axe.

For more information on this year’s fellows, please visit the MacArthur Foundation’s website. 

EDITOR’S NOTE

Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the world’s foremost research universities and is a member of the selective Association of American Universities. NYU has degree-granting university campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai and has 13 other global academic sites, including London, Paris, Florence, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, and Accra, and US sites in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, CA, and Tulsa, OK. Through its numerous schools and colleges, NYU is a leader in conducting research and providing education in the arts and sciences, law, medicine, business, dentistry, engineering, education, nursing, the cinematic and performing arts, music and studio arts, public service, social work, public health, and professional studies, among other areas.

 

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