Department of History

Emily A. Owens (Ph.D. Harvard University) researches and teaches about US slavery, the legal history of race and sexual violence, and the intellectual history of American feminisms. She is most interested in the ways that massive cultural, legal and economic systems shape intimate life across different historical moments.

Her first book, Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans was published by University of North Carolina Press in January 2023. This book tells stories of enslaved women who were conscripted into brothels, concubinage, or the so-called "fancy trade," to historicize the legal mechanisms and  economic structures that produced slavery's violent sexual culture. Starting with the intellectual work that enslaved women did to navigate and survive the situations they found themselves in, this book highlights the poverty of "consent" as a legal and political concept that might protect women from sexual harm. Owens has published essays related to this project in Louisiana History, differences, The Black Scholar, and the edited collection Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press 2022).