Dr. Rashauna Johnson

Biography

Rashauna Johnson is a historian specializing in 19th-century African diaspora, with a particular emphasis on slavery and emancipation in the South Atlantic World. She explores the limitations and possibilities of archival histories for understanding the lives of enslaved and freed people. Johnson teaches courses on race, slavery, and nation, focusing on methodologies in slavery studies and 19th-century historical contexts. She is the author of "Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions," published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. This work has garnered significant recognition, including the 2016 Williams Prize for book Louisiana history and the 2018 H. L. Mitchell Award from the Southern Historical Association. Current projects include her upcoming book "Sweet Home Feliciana: Family, Slavery, and the Hauntings of History," and she is also co-editing the Cambridge History of the African Diaspora, Volume on slave trades and commodification. Johnson has dedicated herself to engaged scholarship, frequently delivering lectures at public and private high schools and teaching literature courses in correctional facilities. She earned her BA in Afro-American Studies and Political Science from Howard University and her PhD in History from New York University, where she was a recipient of the 2011 Dean's Outstanding Dissertation Award in Humanities.

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Experience