Carole Emberton’s talk explores freedpeople’s struggles to find, establish, and maintain a sense of home in the decades after emancipation in the nineteenth century. In particular, she will explore the ways that the sites of enslavement—the plantation—continued to shape their understanding of self and family and provide them with a sense of rootedness and belonging despite (or perhaps because of) the historical traumas experienced there.

Carole received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and her PhD from Northwestern University. A member of the faculty at UB since 2007, she teaches courses on the Civil War, historical memory, public history, and a UB Seminar on genealogy and family history. She is the author of Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago, 2013), which won the Willie Lee Rose Prize for best book in southern history from the Southern Association of Women Historians. She is currently working on a new book about the freedom stories told by ex-slaves in the Federal Writers’ Project. The Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner: An Intimate History of Freedom is under contract with W.W. Norton and is scheduled to be published in 2021.

Join us at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for our eighth year of Faculty Fellows talks! This lecture series brings current UB humanities research out into the community – with complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres. Free and open to the public.