Department of History - University of Michigan

Rebecca J. Scott

Professor
Ph.D. Princeton, 1982

Other U of M Affiliation:
Professor of Law, UM Law School; Faculty Associate, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies

Contact Information:
University of Michigan
1749 Haven Hall
Phone: 734-763-4779
Second Office: 969 Legal Research
Second Phone: 734-615-2082
E-mail: rjscott@umich.edu

Field(s) of Study:
Latin America; Cuban history; slavery and emancipation; race, law, and citizenship in the United States; slavery and the law

Homepage:
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/rebecca.j.scott/home

Biography:
Rebecca Scott received an A.B. from Radcliffe College, an M. Phil in economic history from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. She began research in Cuban history in 1976, and was one of the first North American scholars to carry out research in national and local archives in the island of Cuba. In 1987 she and several colleagues founded the Postemancipation Societies Project, a collaborative research and teaching project that linked faculty and graduate students at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and the University of Maryland. She is now co-director, with Profs. Martha Jones and Jean Michel Hébrard, of the Law in Slavery and Freedom project, begun in 2003, which has similar connections to colleagues at the University of Cologne, Germany, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Scott is also a Professor at the University of Michigan Law School, where she teaches a course on the boundaries of citizenship in historical perspective, and a seminar on the law in slavery and freedom.

Selected Publications:
Rebecca J. Scott, “Public Rights, Social Equality, and the Conceptual Roots of the Plessy Challenge,” Michigan Law Review 106-5 (March 2008): 777-804.

“The Atlantic World and the Road to Plessy vs. Ferguson,” Journal of American History, 94 (December, 2007): 726-733.

Rebecca J. Scott and Jean Michel Hébrard, “Les Papiers de la Liberté: Une Mère Africaine et ses Enfants à l’Epoque de la Révolution Haïtienne,” (Writing Freedom: An African Mother and her Children in the Era of the Haitian Revolution) GENÈSES (Paris) 66 (March 2007): 4-29.

Rebecca J. Scott, “Public Rights and Private Commerce: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary,” CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY (April 2007): 237-249; scholarly responses, pp. 249-254. (The 2005 Sidney Mintz Lecture, Johns Hopkins University).

Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2005). http://sitemaker.umich.edu/law.slavery.freedom/home

Louis A. Perez and Rebecca Scott, eds, The Archives of Cuba/Los Archivos de Cuba (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003).

Rebecca Scott, Thomas C. Holt, Frederick Cooper, and Aims McGuinness, eds., Societies after Slavery: A Select Annotated Bibliography (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).

Rebecca J. Scott and Michael Zeuske, "Property in Writing, Property on the Ground: Pigs, Horses, Land and Citizenship in the Aftermath of Slavery, Cuba 1880-1909," Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (October 2002): 669-699.

"Reclaiming Gregoria's Mule: The Meanings of Freedom in the Arimao and Caunao Valleys, Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1880-1899," Past and Present (February 2001):181-216.

Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt, Rebecca Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor and Citizenship (UNC Press, 2000).

"Small-Scale Dynamics of Large-Scale Processes," in the AHR Forum titled "Crossing Slavery's Boundaries," American Historical Review 105 (April 2000): 472-479.

Slave Emancipation in Cuba (Princeton, 1985).

Faculty and Staff - Graduate Program - Undergraduate Program - Courses