Amrita Chakrabarti Myers

• Assistant Professor, Department of History

Education

• B.A. at University of Alberta-Edmonton, 1993
• M.A. at University of Alberta-Edmonton, 1995
• Ph.D. at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, 2004

Contact Information

Ballantine Hall, Rm. 733

(812) 855-2030

Background

I am a historian of the black female experience in the United States, and my research interests revolve around issues and ideas of race, gender, freedom, and citizenship, and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of black women in the Old South.

My forthcoming monograph from UNC Press, Negotiating Women: Race, Gender, and Freedom in the Nineteenth Century South, is a social history illuminating the lives of free black women, both legal and de facto, in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1790-1860. At its heart, the project analyzes the tactics that black female Charlestonians utilized to acquire, define, and defend their own vision of freedom, methods which included the acquisition of wealth, networking with people in positions of power, and utilizing the state's judicial apparatus. Examining life, liberty, and ideas about civil rights from the perspective of those invested with the least formal power in the Old South, this study concludes that antebellum black women used all the resources at their disposal to enjoy a freedom of their own design as opposed to one that was shaped for them by white southerners. Drawing on family papers, legislative documents, probate records, parish registers, census data, tax lists and city directories, this project thus restores black women to their rightful place as social, economic, and political actors in the pre-war South.

Selected Awards

•  2009    Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize-Best Article on African American Women's History, "The Bettingall-Tunno Family and the Free Black Women of Antebellum Charleston: A Freedom Both Contingent and Constrained," Association of Black Women Historians

• 2009     Trustees Teaching Award, Department of History, Indiana University 

• 2007    Overseas Conference Grant, Office of the Vice President for International Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington

• 2007    Travel Research Grant, Institute for Southern Studies, University of South Carolina, Columbia

• 2001    Mellon Fellow, Library Company of Philadelphia

Research Interests

• Black women
• African American history
• 19th-century U.S.
• The old South
• Social history
• Race, gender, sexuality and violence
• Freedom and citizenship

Courses Recently Taught

Undergraduate:

• African American History- to 1865
• African American History- 1865 to the Present
• From Jezebel to Welfare Queen: Images of Black Women in U.S. History
• Sex, Lies, and Diaries: Untold Southern Stories
• U.S. Survery- to 1865

Graduate:

• Black Women in American History
• Women of the African Diaspora

Publication Highlights

"Black Women, Religious Rhetoric, and the Legacy of Abraham Lincoln."  Journal of African American History, forthcoming, 2010.

"The Bettingall-Tunno Family and the Free Black Women of Antebellum Charleston: A Freedom Both Contingent and Constrained." In Marjorie Julian Spruill et al., eds. South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume One. Athens: University of Georgia, 2009): 143-167.

“Margaret Mercer.” American National Biography. New York: Oxford University, 1998.

“Sisters in Arms: Slave Women’s Resistance to Slavery in the United States.” Past Imperfect. Edmonton: University of Alberta, 1996.