Kirsten Sword

• Assistant Professor, Department of History
• Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies

Education

• Ph.D. at Harvard University, 2002

Contact Information

Ballantine Hall, Rm. 735

(812) 855-6289

Background

I am a historian of early America and American women's history. My central intellectual concern is with the transformation of early modern household relations of dependence from assumed and accepted ways of ordering society into social and political problems. How did we get from a world where marriage, slavery and servitude were seen as good, necessary and inter-connected means of enforcing hierarchical social order, to the modern view that such institutional hierarchies are profoundly unjust? I am currently working on two book projects that address these questions in different ways. Wives not Slaves: Dependence, Authority and Justice in Early America, uses the experiences of runaway wives, slaves and servants to document ordinary people's changing ideas about justice in households between 1660 and 1800. My second project tells the stories of six forgotten people whose lives intersected in the freedom suit that spurred the founding of the world's first antislavery society. Their experiences provide windows on the emergence of antislavery as a social movement, on the development of the internal slave trade, and above all into the problem of identity—Atlantic and national, racial and personal—during the revolutionary era. In addition to topical courses related to my scholarly pursuits, I teach a graduate colloquium examining the ways computing technology ("the new media") is affecting the practice and perception of history.

Selected Awards

• Research Fellowship, Indiana University New Frontiers (2005)
• Research Fellowship, Library Company of Philadelphia (2005)
• Kraus Research Fellowship, American Historical Association (2005)
• Organization of American Historians Lerner-Scott Prize for best dissertation in U.S. Women's History, Finalist
• Barra Post-Doctoral Fellowship, McNeill Center for Early American Studies (declined)
• Artemas Ward Dissertation Fellowship, Harvard University
• Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Grant in Women's Studies

Research Interests

• Early America
• American women's history
• Law and society
• Antislavery and feminism
• History and the new media

Courses Recently Taught

• Marriage and the American Nation
• Women, Feminism and History
• Digital History

Publication Highlights

Books

(Manuscript) Wives not Slaves: Dependence, Authority and Justice in Early America

(Manuscript) Revolutionary Lives: Stories of Slavery, Freedom and the Problem of Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World