Dr. Sue Peabody
Sue Peabody is an associate professor at Washington State University Vancouver and president of the French Colonial Historical Society. She is an internationally renowned historian whose dynamic work examines the historical origins and intersections of gender, race, and slavery in the French Atlantic. Dr. Peabody has received numerous awards and invitations to present her work at some of the most prestigious universities in the United States, including Harvard University’s Atlantic History Seminar, Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the History Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and the upcoming Stanford Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Colloquia.
Peabody’s work on the historical origins of race reveals the remarkably complex and interesting roots of this intellectual and social category. Her books (There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime [Oxford University Press, 1996], available as an e-book (see links on right),and The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France [Duke University Press, 2003]) and articles show how French understandings of race are fluid, invented and political – and distinct from those of the United States and elsewhere in the Atlantic world.
Dr. Peabody’s interest in the origins of racism grew out of her experience as a white student in the recently integrated public schools in Washington DC in the late 1960s and 1970s. These same schools taught her the French language, setting the groundwork for later travels and studies in France. In graduate school at the University of Iowa, Dr. Peabody’s unique perspective led her to examine the legal status of blacks in eighteenth-century France and to question France’s supposedly “colorblind” approach to racial equality.
In her classroom today, Dr. Peabody asks students to reflect upon the workings of race-thinking in their own lives. She emphasizes that race-thinking affects everyone as it reinforces economic and political privilege. Many students find it tremendously liberating to acknowledge the fact that we are all prejudiced: we pre-judge people all the time based upon appearance – including race. Dr. Peabody’s classes teach students to see that difference is real; what we need to learn is how to listen to one another’s experiences and understand how our personal histories have led us to become the people that we are today.
Dr. Peabody’s latest book, Slavery Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World, co-edited with Brazilian scholar Dr. Keila Grinberg (University of Rio de Janeiro) will be published by Bedford Books in March 2007. It contains dozens of legal texts from the French, British, Spanish and Portuguese empires in which slaves and free people of color attempted to secure their freedom through judicial actions during the Age of Revolution and Emancipation (1770-1888).