Erica Duncan

Erica N. Duncan is a postdoctoral scholar at the Richards Center and the Africana Research Center (ARC) at Pennsylvania State University. She earned a Ph.D. in History, with specializations in African Diaspora and early North American histories from New York University (NYU). Her research and interests are in histories of race, gender, childhood, the body, slavery, and freedom.

As a postdoctoral scholar, Erica will work on her forthcoming manuscript, Contested Childhoods: Black Children and the Making of Freedom in the British Atlantic, 1700-1833. Contested Childhoods draws on the interdisciplinary methods of Black feminisms, childhood studies, and critical disability studies to piece together the lives of enslaved children of African descent. By following the lives of those captured and traded in West Africa, South Carolina, and the British Caribbean, she locates a vital aspect of the Black Atlantic in the networks of care that attempted to protect these children and re-articulate what a Black childhood meant to their communities.  She argues their assertions of Black childhoods both critiqued the systems that dispossessed them and became an essential freedom practice. Prior to NYU, Erica earned an M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA and a  B.A. in African American Studies and Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. Her research has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Gilder Lehrman Institute, OAH, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and NYU, among others.