European Forum on US History: Beth Wilson

Beth Wilson is a Lecturer in History at Cardiff University, having previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Rothermere American Institute and University of Reading. Beth’s first monograph, “I Felt All This”: Enslaved People’s Emotional Lives in the Antebellum US South, will be published by Cambridge University Press next year. Drawing on methods from the history of emotions to study enslaved people’s lives, her book exposes the social, cultural and political role that emotion played in the US South. Beth has also published articles on slavery, emotions and gender in Slavery and Abolition and American Nineteenth Century History. She also recently co-edited a collection, Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World, alongside Emily West.

In her paper, Dr. Wilson draws on history of emotions methods to explore enslaved people’s emotional lives in the antebellum US South. Re-considering a well-analysed source set, the Works Progress Administration interviews conducted in the 1930s with formerly enslaved people, her paper considers two moments of collective emotional expression that formerly enslaved people testified to – sale and religious gatherings. Exploring patterns in these individual accounts of collective emotion, this paper will reveal how enslaved people navigated enslavers’ restrictions on their emotions, created gendered and spatially defined emotional standards for expression that sat in explicit opposition to these restrictions and ultimately, how enslaved people developed their own emotional frameworks to resist and survive the institution of slavery.

See the full invitation here.