Profile
Rashauna Johnson
Associate Professor
Department of History and the College
Rashauna Johnson’s research focuses on slavery and emancipation in the African diaspora. She is especially interested in labor, space and place, and gender and sexuality in the 19th-century US South. Her 2016 book, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge), won the H. L. Mitchell Award of the Southern Historical Association and the Williams Book Prize of The Historical New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association. She is currently at work on a book about family, region, slavery, and emancipation in 19th-century Louisiana.
Her work has been published in Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, Journal of African American History, Black Perspectives, and Reviews in American History. She has contributed chapters to Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History (University of Rochester Press, 2012) and Heterosexual Histories (NYU Press, forthcoming, 2021).
Johnson received her PhD in history with a concentration in the African diaspora from New York University and her BA in Afro-American studies and political science summa cum laude from Howard University. She previously taught at Dartmouth College and was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University.