We’re very pleased to announce yet another addition to The Junto and to welcome Hannah Bailey as our newest contributor.

Hannah is a PhD candidate in history at the College of William & Mary. Her research focuses on the interconnectivity between developing notions of race and the expansion of the African slave trade in the early modern French Atlantic. She graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010, with degrees in History and French, and a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her master’s thesis focused on how women like Eliza Jaquelin Ambler Brent Carrington remembered, defined, and recorded their experiences during the American Revolution for her master’s thesis.

Her dissertation uses histories of West Africa written by individuals like Jean-Baptiste Labat to help explain why, in early eighteenth-century accounts of the region, the fiction of African inferiority began to supersede the fact of African political and economic dominance on the West African coast. She is an avid proponent for early Americanists visiting French archives and in finding meaning in the lives of otherwise unknowable people mentioned in manuscript documents.

Please join us in welcoming Hannah!