George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Nicole Viglini received her PhD in history from University of California, Berkeley, and specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. histories of slavery, capitalism, gender, and legal cultural histories. Nicole’s dissertation, “‘She is a very smart woman and a great trader’: Enslaved and Free Women’s Economic Strategies and Gendered Geographies of Credit in the Nineteenth-Century South,” foregrounds enslaved and free Black women’s skills, knowledge, and survival strategies, and shows how antebellum southern women claimed property and credit to define their belonging within their communities. Her project centers the testimony of propertied Black women who filed claims to compensation before the Southern Claims Commission (SCC), a federal organization created in 1871 to reimburse unionist southerners in seceded states for property confiscated by the U.S. Army during the Civil War. At the Richards Center, Nicole will focus on turning her dissertation into a book manuscript and will begin a digital project to bring visibility to the lives and livelihoods of the Black women who filed SCC claims. Nicole’s work has been supported by several institutions, including the American Historical Association, the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University.