Childish Freedoms: Black Children and the Making of Freedom in South Carolina and the Bahamas, 1715-1838
Erica Duncan is a historian of slavery, gender, childhood, and freedom movements within the Black Atlantic. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at New York University, specializing in histories of the African Diaspora. Her dissertation, “Childish Freedoms: Black Children and the Making of Freedom in South Carolina and the Bahamas, 1715-1838,” centers on the lives of enslaved and freed children of African descent in the British Atlantic to examine how British settlers used these children as tools of settlement, while also showing how these children became essential to shaping ideas of freedom within the Black Atlantic.
Her research has been supported by the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), and the South Caroliniana Library among others. She holds a BA in African American Studies and Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley and an MA in African American Studies from UCLA.