On 19 February 2026, RIAS PhD candidate Christine Mertens will defend her dissertation, titled “Contested Mobility: Free African Americans and the Law in the U.S. South, 1790-1830s” at Leiden University.
Her dissertation examines how laws regulating mobility shaped experiences of freedom for free African Americans in the early American South. Christine examined sources such as court records, petitions, and travel passes to show these ‘mobility laws’ made freedom increasingly precarious and subject to constant negotiation. Exposed to the risk of being deemed “illegal” by living in violation of the law or moving without official papers, free African Americans were vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, forced labor, and separation from their families, much like undocumented migrants today. Focusing on the period from the 1790s to the 1830s, she reveals how factors such as the threat of exposure, social and economic standing, and personal connections impacted who could find legal protection and who instead had to evade the law through other means or even felt pressured to leave the state altogether.
Her project was supervised by Prof. Dr. Damian Pargas and Dr. Viola Müller. Christine Mertens became a PhD candidate at the RIAS in 2021, as part of the “Racial Democracy” scholarship project. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam.
The defense will take place at Academiegebouw, Rapenburg 73, Leiden, at 16:00. If you wish to attend the ceremony, please contact Christine directly, (c.m.m.mertens@uva.nl).
For more insight into her research, you can visit her page at the RIAS website.
Livestream is available here.
