Amrita Chakrabarti Myers

Director of Graduate Studies, Department of History

Ruth N. Halls Professor, Departments of History and Gender Studies

Affiliate Faculty, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies

Affiliate Faculty, Department of American Studies

Campus
IU; IU Bloomington

Full Biography

I am a historian of the black female experience in the United States, and my research interests revolve around issues of race, gender, freedom, and power and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of black women in the Old South.

My first book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, (UNC Press, 2011) examines the lives of free black women, both legal and de facto, in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1790-1860. At its heart, the project analyzes the tactics that black female Charlestonians utilized to acquire, define and defend their own vision of freedom, methods which included the acquisition of wealth, networking with people in positions of power, and utilizing the state's judicial apparatus. Examining life, liberty, and ideas about civil rights from the perspective of those invested with the least formal power in the Old South, this study concludes that antebellum black women used all the resources at their disposal to enjoy a freedom of their own design as opposed to one that was shaped for them by white southerners. Drawing on family papers, legislative documents, probate records, parish registers, census data, tax lists and city directories, this project restores black women to their rightful place as social, economic, and political actors in the pre-Civil War South.

My second book, which will be publishd in 2019, is currently titled, "Remembering Julia: A Tale of Sex, Race, Power, and Place." This project examines the decades-long relationship of Julia Chinn, a woman of color, and U.S. congressman, senator, and one-term Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson, a white man. The couple openly lived together in rural Kentucky during the 1810s, 20s and 30s, despite public disapproval of interracial sex, and Julia and her daughters acquired a fair amount of social and financial power due to their connection to Richard, who never married a white woman and who referred to Julia as his wife. The limits of Julia's power was clearly marked, however, and the privileges of white kinship declined for black women the further they moved from the source of their power, which radiated out from their homes and local communities. Black women also discovered that any attempt to acquire many of the social niceties and respect extended to white women would often bring swift and unpleasant retribution.

Honors and Awards

  • American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2017
  • Phillis Wheatley Book Prize, best monograph in Black Studies, Northeast Black Studies Association (2013)
  • Julia Cherry Spruill Book Award, best monograph in Southern Women’s History, Southern Association of Women Historians (2012)
  • Anna Julia Cooper-CLR James Book Award, best monograph in Africana Studies, National Council for Black Studies (2012)
  • George C. Rogers Jr. Book Award, best monograph on South Carolina History, South Carolina Historical Society (2012)
  • Letitia Woods Brown Book Award: Honorable Mention, best monograph published in Black Women’s History, Association of Black Women Historians (2012)
  • Frances Marshall Achievement Award (for excellence in teaching and mentoring), Alpha Phi Alpha-Gamma Eta Chapter, Indiana University (2011)
  • Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize--Best Article in African American Women’s History, for “The Bettingall-Tunno Family and the Free Black Women of Antebellum Charleston: A Freedom Both Contingent and Constrained”, Association of Black Women Historians (2009)
  • Trustees’ Teaching Award, Department of History, Indiana University (2009)

Research Interests

  • Black Women
  • African American History
  • 19th-Century U.S.
  • The Old South
  • Slavery
  • Social History
  • Race, Gender, Interracial Sex, and Sexuality
  • Freedom, Citizenship, and Power

Education

  • Ph.D. at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, 2004

Other Activities

I am a committed social justice activist and spend much of my time, on and off campus, doing work that relates to the betterment of black life in some way, shape or form. That includes being a regular co-anchor on WFHB's African American radio show, "Bring It On!"; helping to co-found Btown Justice, a community organization that functions as a social justice information clearinghouse, standing in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter and the modern civil rights movement; giving talks across the country on a variety of issues; organizing teach-ins on race and gender matters; and more. I'm also regularly called upon to give speeches and interviews in a variety of venues and to various media outlets about issues that concern the black community. A few of those are linked here for you.

PBS NewsHour TV Interview: Bias and the Starbucks Controversy, May 2018.

https://#https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcPFkpM6BGk&t=6s

On "White Supremacy and Policing:" BLM Protest Rally, July 2016.

https://www.facebook.com/6824706/videos/10107385564256889/

Radio Interview with Douglas Storm about Juneteenth on "Interchange," WFHB Radio, June 2015.

http://wfhb.org/news/interchange-the-significant-insignificance-of-juneteenth/

Courses Taught

Undergraduate

  • Wenches, Witches, and Welfare Queens: Images of Black Women in U.S. History
  • Sex, Lies, and Diaries: Interracial Relations in the Old South
  • From Mammy to Michelle: Black Women in American History
  • African American History: To 1865
  • African American History: Since 1865
  • U.S. Survey- to 1865
  • History of Feminist Thought and Practice

Graduate

  • Slavery in the African Diaspora: Comparisons and Contrasts
  • Readings in African-American History
  • Black Women in American History
  • Gender in the African Diaspora
  • Nineteenth Century America

Publications

  • Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
  • "Black Women, Religious Rhetoric, and the Legacy of Abraham Lincoln," Journal of African American History, Vol. 94 No. 4 (2009): 561-570.
  • "The Bettingall-Tunno Family and the Free Black Women of Antebellum Charleston: A Freedom both Contingent and Constrained," in Marjorie Julian Spruill et al., eds., South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume One (Athens: University of Georgia, 2009): 143-167.