Historian Jennifer L. Morgan ’86 Wins MacArthur Fellowship

Jennifer L. Morgan, a historian and professor whose work explores the lives of enslaved women and deepens our understanding of the origins of race-based slavery in early America, has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for 2024. Morgan is a 1986 graduate of Oberlin College.

Popularly known as the "Genius Grant," the MacArthur Fellowship is one of the nation's most prestigious honors, recognizing talented, creative, and inspiring people who have shown exceptional originality in a variety of fields. Each fellow receives a stipend of $800,000 with no strings attached.

Morgan is the 15th graduate of Oberlin College and Conservatory to be named a MacArthur Fellow and the third in the last three years. She follows composer and pianist Courtney Bryan '04, who won in 2023, and writer and educator Kiese Laymon '98, a 2022 honoree.

A lifelong New Yorker, Morgan earned a BA from Oberlin College in the self-designed major Third World Studies and a PhD in History from Duke University in 1995. She is a professor of history in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, the author of numerous journal articles and two books.

Morgan's first book, the groundbreaking Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004), prompted one reviewer to compare her sensitive analysis of the meaning of childbearing and motherhood under slavery to Toni Morrison's literary exploration of those themes in Beloved. Her second book, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (2011), won the Mary Nickliss Prize in Women's and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians and the Frederick Douglass Prize, awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.