Department of History

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers

  • Assistant Professor, Department of History

Education

  • 2004 - Doctor of Philosophy in History, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
  • 1995 - Master of Arts in History, University of Alberta-Edmonton
  • 1993 - Bachelor of Arts in Classics and History, University of Alberta-Edmonton

Contact Information

Ballantine Hall, Rm. 733
(812) 855-2030

Background

Amrita Chakrabarti MyersOriginally from Canada, I am a historian of the black female experience in the United States and my main interests are race, gender, freedom and citizenship and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of black women, particularly in the antebellum South.  

My manuscript-in-progress, “Negotiating Women: Black Women and the Politics of Freedom in Charleston, South Carolina, 1790-1860,” analyzes the tactics that enslaved women in Charleston utilized to first acquire and then define, shape and defend their freedom while continuing to live in a slave state, including their use of both the state’s legislative and judicial systems.  Examining freedom from the perspective of those invested with the least formal power in the antebellum era, my work restores black women to their rightful place as economic actors and political agents in the Old South

Selected Awards

  • 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
  • 1998    Harvey Fellow, Mustard Seed Foundation

Research Interests

  • Black Women
  • African American History
  • Nineteenth 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
  • Black Women in America History: From Contact to Civil Rights
  • New Directions in Race, Class and Gender: The Old South
  • U.S. Survery- to 1865
Graduate:
  • Black Women in American History: To 1920
  • Women of the African Diaspora

Publication Highlights

“Crossing the Freedom Frontier: Black Women and Manumission in Early National Charleston.” Journal of African American History, forthcoming.

“A Freedom both Contingent and Constrained: The Bettingall-Tunno Family and the Free Black Women of Charleston, South Carolina, 1790-1860.”  In Marjorie Spruill et al., eds. South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times. Athens: University of Georgia, 2009.

“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.