Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University where she also serves as Chair. She is the author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2020)
Professor Morgan discusses recent journal article “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery.” Exploring how Virginia laws developed to codify enslaved women’s reproductive labor, by defining and undermining family heredity by slave status and binding slavery to race. We talk about Elizabeth Keye’s court case as a pivotal moment in Colonial Law.