Dr Aisha Djelid
Broadbent Career Development Fellow in American History
St Edmund Hall
I am the Broadbent Career Development Fellow in American History at the Rothermere American Institute and Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall. I completed my BA (Hons), MA, and PhD at the University of Reading. After completing my PhD I worked at Reading and at Queen Mary University of London before joining Oxford in 2024.
Research Interests
My doctoral thesis focused on the forced reproduction of enslaved people in the pre-Civil War US South. It explored the impact of semi-organised sexual violence as a form of proto-eugenics and pronatalism through the framework of family, gender, health, and valuation.
My current postdoctoral project also focuses on the pre-Civil War South, but explores ideas of childhood, agency, resistance, and refusal to argue that enslaved children resisted and refused their enslavement in day-to-day ways.
Bluesky:@aishadjelid.bsky.social
Publications
Forthcoming:
Fruits of Their Labor: Slavery, Forced Reproduction, and Family in the Antebellum South
(University of Georgia Press, 2027)
Fruits of Their Labor explores how enslaved men, women, and children experienced forced reproduction in the antebellum South and considers the impact of those experiences on their day-to-day lives. It considers four main aspects of these experiences: enslavers’ interference in relationships, fatherhood, medical governance, and marketization. Using the life cycle as a framework, it argues that forced reproduction affected all members of enslaved communities at every stage of their lives. The book further argues that elite white people strengthened the institution of slavery on the backs of enslaved peoples’ reproductive and productive labor by following proto-“eugenic” pronatalist ideology that set the foundations for racist ideology enforced by white supremacists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book’s framework allows for a broad exploration of the emotional and physical trauma that sexual violence and forced reproduction left behind. Djelid thus argues that the role of enslaved fathers was diminished in order for slaveholding men to promote themselves as the sole patriarch on the plantation. Fruits of Their Labor considers how enslavers regimented food and medicine to ensure that enslaved children grew up into “likely” producers and reproducers, and finally, it interrogates the intergenerational trauma of sale and separation, as enslaved parents reckoned with the reality their children were to be sold as producers and reproducers.