Connor is a rising senior studying History and Africana Studies studying slavery's afterlives through a spatial and genealogical lens in his home state of North Carolina. He co-facilitates a Reading Group at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice on the modern carceral state which underwrites his commitment to subverting the boundaries of academic knowledge and to intellectual accountability.

Project:
In 1861, Harriet Jacobs anonymously published her narrative about her escape from slavery. In the 1970s, historians located Jacobs’ enslavement in Edenton, North Carolina. To understand regional (mis-)remembering of slavery, I will map Edenton geographies and lineages pre-1865 and post-1865 through correspondence and newspapers. By interviewing Edentonians, I will investigate antebellum legacies in modern space and gender roles. This project simply asks: what changed in Edenton after emancipation? Much historiography considers slavery through geography and gender, yet local histories often omit these analytics. Calculated local forgetting of slavery undergirds spectacular insurrectionary activity and quotidian structural inequality, rendering this project urgent and timely. 

Advisor: Françoise Hamlin