On 9 September 2025, RIAS PhD candidate Marcella Schute will defend her dissertation, titled “Securing the Future of Black Labor: Covert Attempts to Reopen the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Louisiana, 1853-1861” at Leiden University.
Her project explores the efforts by the state of Louisiana to reopen the transatlantic slave trade in the late 1850s. The role that Louisiana fulfilled in the southern movement to reopen the international slave trade so far remains largely neglected in the historical scholarship. Marcella argues that the main motivation for slaveholders and politicians in Louisiana to reopen the transatlantic slave trade was to secure the future of Black labor in the state. Although the slave trade was never legally reopened, this project adds to scholars’ understanding of how ideas about reopening the slave trade in Louisiana altered the dynamics of migration, mobility and freedom in the Atlantic world.
Her project was supervised by Prof. Dr. Damian Pargas and Dr. Nancy Mykoff. Marcella Schute became a PhD candidate at the RIAS in 2021, as part of the “Racial Democracy” scholarship project. She is currently a lecturer at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
The defense will take place at Academiegebouw, Rapenburg 73, Leiden, at 13:00. If you wish to attend the ceremony, please contact Marcella directly, (marcella.schute@gmail.com).
For more insight into her research, you can visit her page at the RIAS website.
