Publications
Current book project: Oceans of Kinfolk: the Coastwise Traffic of Enslaved People to New Orleans, 1820-1860.
As documented by the Oceans of Kinfolk database, enslavers trafficked more than 63,000 enslaved persons to New Orleans, the nation’s largest slave market, in the forty years before the Civil War. Most came from families that had been enslaved in Virginia and Maryland for generations: American ancestries that predated the nation itself. The antebellum domestic slave trade, Williams argues, wrought havoc not only on individual lives, but on entire networks of kin and community. Oceans of Kinfolk (the book) presents the first comprehensive account of this violence as evidence of thousands of crimes against humanity for which redress and reparations are owed. Ultimately, however, Oceans of Kinfolk is not a book about violence. It is a book about kinship: relationality surely violable, pliable, and reconfigurable, but impossible to obliterate. Forthcoming from UNC Press in 2025.
Articles, Essays, Blog Posts, Etc.
Williams, Jennie K. Review of Street Diplomacy: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom in Philadelphia, 1820–1850, by Elliott Drago. Journal of Southern History 89, no. 4 (2023): 747-748. https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2023.a909868.
Williams, Jennie K. “Finders Aren’t Keepers: Rethinking and Reconfiguring the Oceans of Kinfolk Database.” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 4, no. 3 (2023): 44-61. https://doi.org/10.25971/p79h-e857.
Williams, Jennie K. "The Coastwise Traffic to New Orleans Dataset: Documenting North American Voyages in the IASTD." Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 4, no. 2 (2023): 27-34. https://doi.org/10.25971/bpz3-0f38.
Jennie Williams, American Slavery at Sea: Complexities of the Coastwise Traffic. Echoes: The SlaveVoyages Blog - American Slavery at Sea. March 16, 2023.
Jennie Williams and Janelle S. Peifer, “White Scholars and Black Spaces,” Diverse: Issues in Higher Ed, June 7, 2022.
Jennie K. Williams (2020) Trouble the water: The Baltimore to New Orleans coastwise slave trade, 1820–1860, Slavery & Abolition, 41:2, 275-303, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2019.1660509
Jennie Williams, “JHU, too, must atone for its slavery connection,” The Baltimore Sun, February 15, 2018.