Faculty

Catherine A. Molineux
Associate Professor of History

PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 2005

British Atlantic History; North American colonial history; history of early modern Britain; race and slavery; cultural studies

Telephone: 615-322-9369
Email: catherine.a.molineux@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays 10:00 am - 12:00 noon
Office: 221 Benson Hall

Catherine Molineux is a historian of culture in the early modern British Atlantic world, with a focus on race, slavery, and empire.  She is the author of “Hogarth’s Fashionable Slaves: Moral Corruption in Eighteenth-Century London” in English Literary History (2005) and “Pleasures of the Smoke: ‘Black Virginians’ in Georgian London’s Tobacco Shops” in The William & Mary Quarterly (2007).  "Pleasures of the Smoke" has been named co-winner of the 2008 James L. Clifford Prize from American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). Her book, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain, (Harvard University Press, 2012), analyzes visual and literary representations of black slaves produced in early modern England as a lens into popular beliefs about race, slavery, and empire from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, John Carter Brown Library, The Huntington Library, and Clark Library, among others, have supported her research. Molineux has been awarded the Ryskamp Fellowship, by the American Council of Learned Societies, for the 2013-14 academic year. Molineux is a recipient of a 2012-2013 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Fellowship in conjunction with the Sawyer Seminar entitled “The Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World.” Molineux was awarded a year-long residential fellowship at the Huntington Library 2009-2010.

Professor Molineux teaches undergraduate courses in British Atlantic history, colonial North American history, and early modern British visual culture, race and sexuality, as well as graduate courses on British political thought, Readings in American History, and the methodologies of history.