Join us on Thursday, February 23, 2023, at 5:00 pm in room Tidewater B of the Sadler Center on the campus of William & Mary, for a talk by scholar Vanessa Holden (University of Kentucky) titled “Survival and Resistance: African American Women in Nat Turner’s Community.”

Vanessa Holden is an associate professor of History at the University of Kentucky and director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative. Her book Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community was published in 2021 by the University of Illinois Press. She received her PhD in African American and Women’s and Gender History from Rutgers University. She currently has a dual appointment in both the Department of History department  and the program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on African American women and slavery in the antebellum South. Her areas of interest are the history resistance and rebellion, gender history, and the history of sex/sexuality. She offers courses in American History, African American History, and African American Studies. Her writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Black Perspectives, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus.

The William and Mary Quarterly Lecture series features scholars whose work is transforming our sense of the past.