Rebecca J. Scott
Rebecca J. Scott is the Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor
of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Trained in
Latin American History at Princeton University, she studies slave
emancipation and the formation of societies after slavery. Her current
research includes a study (with Jean Michel Hébrard) of three generations
of an Atlantic family, of which her presentation at the conference is a
part, and a collaborative research and teaching project (with Hébrard and
with Martha S. Jones) on the law in slavery and freedom. Her most recent
book, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2005), won the 2006 Frederick Douglass Prize and the 2006 John Hope Franklin Prize. She has published articles on struggles
over property and standing in postemancipation Cuba, including "Reclaiming
Gregoria's Mule" (which appeared in the journal Past and Present in
February 2001). A visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1995 and 2000, Scott is affiliated with an
ongoing research project at the EHESS called "Espaces Atlantiques."