Jennifer L. Morgan is The Silver Family Professor of History in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University. She is a 2024 recipient of a MacArthur “genius” Award and was the Andrew R. Mellon Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2024-25.
She is the author of the prize-winning Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021) and of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
She is the 3rd generation of her family to make the black Sag Harbor communities their summer homes and is thrilled to be connected now to Sylvester Manor. She has been working to contribute to public history sites and conversations for the past decade. She is currently working on The Eve of Slavery—a project about slavery and freedom in the seventeenth century that centers around Elizabeth Key—a black woman who successfully sued for her freedom in Virginia in 1656. In conjunction with that project, she serves as an Executive Producer for Key to Freedom, a narrative film project written and directed by her daughter Emma “Zinha” Morgan-Bennett.
