Whitney Fields

Postdoctoral Research Associate
Initiative on Race and Resilience

Research Interests

Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century African American History, Urban History, Carceral Studies, Slavery Studies

Biography

Whitney Fields is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience. She earned a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 2025.
Whitney’s work combines carceral studies, urban history, and slavery and emancipation studies to chronicle the long history of American incarceration. Her current project, “Captive in Promised Land: Black Lives, Confinement, and Incarceration in Nineteenth-Century Urban America,” is a history of the incarceration and labor of Black people in the early nineteenth- century urban North. This work foregrounds Black Americans as subjects within the nation’s first prisons and penitentiaries and examines how they figured into and challenged nineteenth-century discourse on abolition, prison reform, and criminalization. The study reanimates the early history of the United States through their narratives of captivity and confinement and attends to the battles they waged when contesting the demands of legislators, prison administrators, and reformers.
This research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Rutgers School of Graduate Studies.