Sophie White

Professor
American Studies

Research Interests

Gender, Race and Slavery, African-American and Native-American Studies; French Colonial America; Material Culture

Biography

Sophie White is Professor of American Studies, Concurrent Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies, and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

She is a historian of early America with an interdisciplinary focus on cultural encounters between Europeans, Africans and Native Americans, and a commitment to Atlantic and global research perspectives.

Her newest book, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 2019) foregrounds an exceptional set of source material about slavery in French America: court cases in which enslaved individuals testified and in the process produced riveting autobiographical narratives. Voices of the Enslaved has won the 2020 James A. Rawley Book Prize from the American Historical Association, the Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Prize in Gender & Sexuality from the Association for the Worldwide Study of the African Diaspora (ASWAD), the 2020 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize, the 2019 Kemper and Leila Williams Book Prize, and the 2020 Summerlee Book Prize, and Honorable Mention, 2020 Merle Curti Award for Best Book in American Social History from the Organization of American Historians. It is shortlististed for the Kenshur Prize for Best Book in Eighteenth-Century Studies and is a finalist for the ASWAD Sterling Stuckey Book Prize and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

With Trevor Burnard, she has co-edited a volume on slave testimony in French and British America 1750-1848 (Routledge, 2020) and she is preparing a digital humanities project, Hearing Slaves Speak in Colonial America: A Database of Voices of the Voiceless, which is under contract with the Omohundro Institute for inclusion in their Ol Reader for "digital projects that expand our understanding of early American history intellectually, conceptually and rhetorically."

Her first book, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana was published with the University of Pennsylvania Press/McNeil Series in Early American Studies in 2012. 

Her next book project examines redhead myths, juxtaposing cultural history with the new genomic discoveries and biological implications of red hair, a project that falls within her purview as a scholar of appearance and cultural constructions of otherness.  She is signed to the Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency for this book.

In addition White is the author of numerous articles and essays, in journals such as The William and Mary Quarterly, Gender and History and The Winterthur Portfolio. Among other grants and awards, White was a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities for Wild Frenchmen  and Voices of the Enslaved.