George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Kathleen M. Brown, David Boies Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, will deliver a closing keynote address for the Symposium on Free State Slavery entitled “Encumbering Liberty in the Shadow of Slavery” on Friday, March 17th in Weaver 102. This event is free and open to the public.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Brown is a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies, the History and Sociology of Science, the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and the lead faculty historian on the Penn & Slavery Project. Brown’s research focuses on intersectional questions of race, gender, sexuality, and labor in colonial North American, Atlantic, and early U.S. contexts. She is the author of two prize-winning books, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996) and Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2009). Her most recent book, Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition (February 2023, University of Pennsylvania Press), considers how the campaign to end slavery entangled activists in a complex process of undoing longstanding practices and habits of the body central to that institution.