Daniel Livesay, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of History

Department

History

Biography

Daniel Livesay is a scholar of Early American and Atlantic History.  His work examines the intersection of race, family, and slavery in North America and the Caribbean.  He teaches courses on slavery, Native American history, the history of the family, revolutions, and racial ideologies in the Americas.  

Professor Livesay's book, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833, was published in January 2018 by the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute.  It chronicles the lives of hundreds of individuals born in the Caribbean to white fathers and free, or enslaved, mothers of color, who eventually left to live with relatives in Britain.  The book demonstrates how questions of family belonging were integral to conceptions of racial difference in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World.

Currently, Professor Livesay is completing work on a manuscript that analyzes what life was like for elderly enslaved people in Virginia and Jamaica.  This research explores how old workers were instrumental to the plantation culture and economy, as well as to broader cultural conceptions of slavery during the era of abolition.

Education

PhD (History) The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2010); BA, The University of Colorado, Boulder (2002)

Awards and Affiliations

National Humanities Center Fellow (2019)

        Sherman Emerging Scholar Award, The University of North Carolina Wilmington (2014)

        National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Postdoctoral Fellowship, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (2010-12)

Fulbright Fellowship to Jamaica (2007-08)

Research and Publications

       “West Meets East: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in India, and the Avenues of Advancement in Imperial Britain,” Atlantic Studies, v. 14, n. 3 (2017): 382-398.

       “Privileging Kinship: Family and Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Early American Studies, v. 14, n. 4 (Fall 2016): 688-711.

“Emerging from the Shadows: New Developments in the History of Interracial Sex and Intermarriage in Colonial North America and the Caribbean,” History Compass, v. 13, n. 3 (March 2015): 122-33.

       "The Decline of Jamaica's Interracial Households and the Fall of the Planter Class, 1733-1823," Atlantic Studies, v. 9, n. 1 (Spring 2012): 107-23.

       “Imagining Difference: Abolition and Mixed Race in the British Atlantic,” in Free at Last?: Reflections on Freedom and the Abolition of the British Transatlantic Slave Trade, eds. Cecily Jones and Amar Wahab (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 39-57.

“All in the Family: Mixed-Race Jamaicans and their Imperial Networks in the Eighteenth Century,” in (Re)Figuring Human Enslavement: Images of Power, Violence and Resistance, eds. Ulrich Pallua, Adrian Knapp, & Andreas Exenberger (Innsbruck University Press, 2009), 149-66.

       “Extended Families: Mixed-Race Children and the Scottish Experience, 1770-1820,” International Journal of Scottish Literature, n. 4 (Spring/Summer 2008): 1-17.

Contact
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