We are pleased to welcome our new PhD students Femke Fakkeldij and Bálint Honos, who will be writing their dissertations under the supervision of Professor Damian Pargas on the project “In the Shadows of Slavery: Free Black Citizenship and Democracy in Antebellum America.” This project is sponsored by Leiden University’s Stichting Praesidium Libertatis I. We are excited to work with them as they pursue their doctoral research.
Femke Fakkeldij holds a master’s degree in North American Studies from Leiden University. She is interested in examining the politicization of Black literary expression in the antebellum North and studying its relation to experiences of free Black citizenship. She is particularly interested in the role of Black literary societies in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City, and the texts produced and distributed by these literary societies. Her research will examine the networks in which these societies operated — including, for instance, abolitionist societies, educational organizations, and the Black press — to gain insight into how Black literary societies enabled free Black Americans to participate in civil society. Furthermore, by considering the ways in which membership of Black literary societies can be understood as a form of participation in the body politic, or as a form of resistance against the body politic, this project examines how and to what extent free Black Americans in the antebellum North were able to exercise their political agency through literary societies.
Bálint Honos holds a master’s degree in History from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He is studying African American communities in early 19th-Century California. His dissertation aims to shed light on the often-overlooked historical narrative of slavery in the Far West of the United States. Bálint’s dissertation will illustrate the impact of migration from the slaveholding South and the freer North on the development of a unique culture in urban areas and mining towns in the West. This environment facilitated intra- and cross-cultural civic dialogues among minorities as well as white frontiersmen. Although the California Constitution (1849) prohibited slavery, Black Americans were deprived of full citizenship, voting rights, and the ability to testify in court. In certain instances, moreover, forms of unfree labor persisted. Bálint asserts that marginalized Black communities responded to the politics of exclusion by participating in civic activities. Such activities, e.g., communal discussions, both reflected and encouraged an involvement in, rather than an abandonment of, the American civic community. As such, owing to their multicultural makeup relative to the era, the struggles of Far West communities foreshadow the fight for civil rights in the 20th-century, in which Black Americans also strived to be accepted as full citizens.
