Historian Jennifer L. Morgan ’86 Wins MacArthur Fellowship

Currently on leave from NYU, Morgan is a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is working on The Eve of Slavery, a book about African women in 17th-century North America—and notably Elizabeth Key, who sued for freedom in 1656 on the grounds that her father was a free white man.

She credits all of it—her extraordinary scholarship and her Genius Grant—to the late Adrienne Lash Jones, the first tenured Black woman in Oberlin’s Africana Studies (then Black Studies) Department and the third in the college’s history. Jones was celebrated for introducing an Africanist perspective to the emerging Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies program, for her relentless pursuit of a more just world, and for her formidable presence on campus.

Jones was “not some kind and sweet and soft mentor,” says Morgan, speaking by phone while walking through Times Square en route to her “egghead heaven” at the library. “She was hard and she was a little scary. She didn’t take any foolishness, and as a result, she made me work harder—more than any other professor that I had at Oberlin. I wouldn’t have gone to graduate school in history. I wouldn't have thought about doing Afro-American women’s history without her. She gave me something to aspire to—this model of what was possible. And that’s what set me in motion.”

Morgan learned of her MacArthur honor via phone call. Her initial reaction was disbelief. “I sort of yelled What? What are you saying? And I feel like tears just shot straight out of my head.”

The reality of her accomplishment is still sinking in. “You know, like many academics, you see the MacArthur list and you just think What a testament to the fact that your work makes a difference. As a professor, as a historian who works in the early modern period, I don’t do work that’s super popular—I don’t work on the civil rights movement, for example—it’s slightly more esoteric. I know that I’ve had an impact on my students. I know that I’ve had an impact on the field, but to have that acknowledged at such a huge scale just feels astonishing to me. I still can’t quite believe that it’s happened. And I feel incredibly humbled and honored.”

As for her stipend, Morgan is interested in using some of it to investigate other ways of telling important stories—to share the history she has uncovered about the experiences of Black women in colonial America with more people than graduate students and other historians. She wants a wider audience to know about these women, to understand “this is why what they went through is important in the history of this country—and in the way that we tell the history of this country.”

Learn more about Morgan at jenniferlylemorgan.com.