Jennifer Palmer
Jennifer Palmer, associate professor of history in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, has been named a 2020 recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. The ACLS Fellowship program honors scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences with the potential to make significant contributions to knowledge in their fields. The awards range from $40,000 to $75,000 and support six to 12 months of full-time research and writing.
Palmer is a historian of Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic and coordinator for the History and Gender Workshop. Her first book, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic, follows the stories of people who built families and fortunes on both sides of the French Atlantic. By focusing on family and household, the units that anchored France in the 18th century, the book shows interconnections among race, gender, colonialism and the plantation system in the early modern period.
“I am thrilled to accept this prestigious nation-wide research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies,” Palmer said. “This fellowship will allow me to work full time on my monograph, Possession: Gender, Race, and Ownership in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic France. This book examines the property-owning practices of free women of color and white women in France and the French Caribbean, and shows how the rise of slavery and the plantation system caused opportunities for women to own property to disappear.”
This year, ACLS Fellowships totaling $4.3 million will be distributed among 81 awardees selected from nearly 1,200 applicants through a multistage peer review process. The supported projects represent a wide array of vital and timely areas of research.