Camp, Stephanie M.H.

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Camp, Stephanie M.H.

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Pennsylvania, B.A., 1990; Yale University, M.A., 1992; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., 1998.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Box 353560, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-3560. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Pennsylvania, instructor, 1997; University of Washington, Seattle, 2002—, became associate professor of history, 2004—. Serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Southern History; lecturer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Yale University fellowship, 1992; Mellon dissertation fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 1995-96; Minority Scholar in Residence, Vassar College, 1997; Huggins-Quarles Dissertation Award, Organization of American Historians, 1997; Mellon postdoctoral research fellowship, 1998; Sydney and Frances Lewis Fellowship for Research in Women's History, Virginia Historical Society, 1999; Royalty Research Fund scholar, University of Washington, 2000; postdoctoral fellow, Ford Foundation, 2000-01; faculty fellow, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities Society of Scholars, University of Washington, 2001; associate fellow, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2001; Institute for Ethnic Studies grants, 2004, 2007; Lillian Smith book award for new voices in nonfiction, Southern Regional Council and University of Georgia Libraries, 2005, for Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South; Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize (with others) for best article on black women's history, 2007, for "Ar'n't I a Woman?" and the "History of Race and Sex in the U.S."

WRITINGS:

Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South ("Gender and American Culture" series), University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2004.

(Editor, with Edward E. Baptist) New Studies in the History of American Slavery, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2006.

Contributor to works by others, including The Encyclopedia of Slavery in the Americas, edited by Edward E. Baptist, 2008. Contributor to journals, including Journal of Women's History, Slavery and Abolition, and Journal of Southern History.

SIDELIGHTS:

Stephanie M.H. Camp has taught at both the University of Pennsylvania and University of Washington, where she became an associate professor of history. She is the author of Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, a volume in the "Gender and American Culture" series of the University of North Carolina Press. The five chapters of this book cover the period from the 1830s through the Civil War and draw on plantation records, slave narratives, letters, laws and court cases, and interviews of former slaves conducted by the Works Progress Administration. In this study Camp describes instances of resistance in everyday life, and in the first chapter, "A Geography of Containment," she examines the control of the activities and movements of slaves, noting that women generally had less freedom than men.

In reviewing Closer to Freedom for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, Tristan Stubbs wrote: "While other scholars have highlighted the importance of time in the subjection of enslaved people, few have focused on space…. It is here that Camp excels. Enslaved men and women continually strove to create a ‘rival geography,’ featuring ‘other kinds of spaces that gave them room and time for their families, for rest from work, and for amusement.’"

Camp demonstrates how women sought small respites from their slavery by retreating to areas forbidden to them, which could include swamps and woods and neighboring plantations, with no intention of permanently fleeing in an attempt to find freedom. Some of these truants temporarily enjoyed the company of family, including children and husbands, while others sought to put off scheduled punishment, which was enforced when these truancies were discovered, particularly in the Deep South. Owners who could not control their slaves were perceived as powerless, and work was left undone while these slaves were missing. At the same time slaves were building power by interacting with others who also tended to take risks. These small levels of resistance, however, led to the bolder escapes made by many slaves in years ahead.

Camp writes that female slaves met secretly, sometimes wearing prohibited clothing and drinking alcohol. Their appearances became important as they took charge of their bodies, as well as their space and time. As the Union Army moved closer, slaves moved more freely in defiance of their owners.

Camp comments on the possession of abolitionist writings by enslaved women who opposed slavery in their homes by hanging posters, and in one noted case a picture of President Abraham Lincoln, on the walls of their cabins. She also notes that bondwomen moved away from the issue during the Civil War and "shows how this overt rejection of slavery was a clear outgrowth of the spaces for independent action that bondwomen and bondmen had created under slavery," commented Sharon Block in the Journal of Southern History. Block concluded by writing that this book "will make all readers rethink how we understand women's lives under slavery, how we understand the historical significance of space, and how we conceptualize the process of slavery itself."

Richard L. Aynes, reviewing Closer to Freedom in the Historian, commented on part of a description of the book that appears on its back cover, "which indicates that Camp ‘discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper.’ When is an act that functionally undermines the authority of slaveholders a ‘fit of temper’ and when is it an act of resistance?" Aynes noted that Camp does not answer this question.

Stubbs wrote that "where formerly enslaved people emphasize the cruelty and violence of slavery we should be persuaded, at the very least, of the ferocity of actions that inspired bitter memories after so many years. Camp uses eyewitness depositions to colorful effect, to chart the very human emotions of people who so often have little voice in the primary record…. The narratives also enable Camp to tie together experiences of enslavement from across a broad geographical range…. Stephanie Camp's book is unsurpassed as a study of the mechanisms of spatial control that defined slavery, and of the mechanisms that enslaved people used in opposition."

Camp is the editor, with Edward E. Baptist, of New Studies in the History of American Slavery, a collection of essays chosen from two conferences. The first, held in May, 2002, at the University of Washington, generated enough interest that a second was held at Rutgers University in May, 2003. Walter C. Rucker wrote in the Journal of Southern History that "the volume offers exceptionally well written, interesting, and innovative approaches that promise to breathe new interpretive life into what many may consider an old topic."

The three sections are titled "Gender and Slavery"; "Race, Identity, and Community"; and "The Politics of Culture in Slavery." Rucker described the beginning of the first section as a "provocative and highly effective essay." This contribution is the first chapter of Jennifer L. Morgan's book Laboring Women: Reproduc-tion and Gender in New World Slavery (2004), in which she describes how the bodies of brown and black women were used by European artists who, through them, portrayed savagery, sexual deviance, and sometimes cannibalism. Morgan demonstrates that the lexicon of difference and race was shaped by the European view of the physical features of African women. Rucker commented: "As one of the stronger anthologies in the field published in recent years, this collection will be useful to specialists and students alike. The one drawback is that, with the exception of three essays, the collection focuses on North American slavery. Given the Atlantic world focus of so much of the best work currently available in the field, this gives a somewhat dated feel to a few of the essays."

Nan Sumner-Mack, who reviewed New Studies in the History of American Slavery in History: Review of New Books, wrote: "Thanks to adroit shaping and editing … the essays bring into clearer focus the long-suspected complexity of daily life in the North American slave labor system."

Camp told CA: "Historians use sources and the more critical among us assume that all of our sources present problems of ‘trustworthiness’ and ‘reliability.’ That is where the work of being a historian comes in: we have to critically assess and carefully engage ‘all’ of our sources. Not only the sources that derive from formerly enslaved people, but also the highly subjective version of history documented in slaveholders' diaries and correspondence, in the laws passed by elites, in the newspapers they published, and so on."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 2006, Kirsten E. Wood, review of Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, p. 173.

Historian, summer, 2006, Richard L. Aynes, review of Closer to Freedom, p. 336.

History: Review of New Books, spring, 2006, Nan Sumner-Mack, review of New Studies in the History of American Slavery, p. 77.

Journal of American History, June, 2006, Christie Ann Farnham Pope, review of Closer to Freedom, p. 206.

Journal of Southern History, November, 2005, Sharon Block, review of Closer to Freedom, p. 893; February, 2008, Walter C. Rucker, review of New Studies in the History of American Slavery, p. 167.

Reference & Research Book News, May, 2006, review of New Studies in the History of American Slavery.