Biography

Justene Hill Edwards is a scholar of African-American history who specializes in the history of slavery in the United States.

She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University, an M.A. in African New World Studies from Florida International University, and a B.A. in Spanish from Swarthmore College. Her first book, Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina, interrogates the ways in which enslaved peoples’ independent economies influenced the plantation economy in South Carolina between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. She has received a number of fellowships and grants, including the Consortium Dissertation Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Princeton University Writing Program’s Quin Morton Teaching Fellowship, the Carnegie Fellowship, and the Mellon New Directions Fellowship.