Introducing Julia Bernier and Herbert Brewer, Our New Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows for the Study of Slavery

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Julia Bernier received her PhD in African American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2017. Julia’s scholarship focuses on slavery and abolition in the nineteenth century United States. Her current project, “A Papered Freedom,” looks at how African Americans in the antebellum United States made use of self-purchase and compensated manumission to become free. Research for this project has been supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She has taught at UMass Amherst and the College of Wooster in Ohio where her courses included Introduction to Black Studies, History of Black America, the Civil War, and Race and Early American Law. 
 

Dr. Herbert Brewer is a historian of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World and an Assistant Professor of History at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. His research focus is the intellectual history of the Chesapeake African-American Diaspora in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Atlantic World. He is a co-author of Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland. His work has also appeared in the African Historical Review.  He received the Diplôme d’Études de Langue Français from the Université de Poitiers, France and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park. He lives in Washington DC with his wife Erica Rapier and their son Aidan.