Lucy Stark

Lucy is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of History working in the field of Transnational, International, and Global History. Her research follows the lives of racialized women and children in the French-speaking Atlantic World, particularly in Senegal, Haiti, and New Orleans. She is particularly interested in France’s 18th and 19th century transition from colonialism in the Caribbean to imperialism in West Africa. As her historical actors crossed borders as legal minors, enslaved captives, and colonial subjects, Lucy is committed to a creative approach to the archives. In addition to labor contracts, liberation records, and property disputes, Lucy draws from visual and cartographic evidence in the form of illustrations, colonial maps, and documentary films. In her career, Lucy hopes to pair academic scholarship with accessible filmmaking to more widely share histories of French and American imperialism and racism. Outside of research, Lucy is a Co-Chair of the Slavery & Freedom Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Currently, Lucy is researching coerced child labor regimes on both sides of the Francophone Atlantic. In antebellum New Orleans, she looks at the apprenticeship of free children of color who migrated to Louisiana from Haiti and Cuba in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. In mid-19th century Senegal, she looks at the liberation and wardship (tutelle) of enslaved children taken from towns and forts along the Senegal River.