The American Studies Program, in collaboration with Black Studies, the DWC program, and the History & Classics and English departments, welcomes Dr. Erin Pearson to discuss her innovative interdisciplinary book, Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, published in 2025 by University of Virginia Press.
UVA press’ website proclaims that Grievous Entanglement “explores the most common way that people in the Atlantic world came to understand their personal connection to, and complicity with, slavery in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: consumption. Consumption became a formidable trope that tied the evils of chattel slavery to individuals’ behavior through their purchase of slave-produced commodities like cotton or sugar. With her groundbreaking analysis of this dominant conceptual framework, Erin Pearson provides new insight into both the motivation behind and the functioning of antislavery activism.”
Erin Pearson’s research focuses on slavery, race, and consumption in transatlantic literature of the long nineteenth century. Before becoming an Associate Professor of English and director of the American Studies Program at Elon University, she was a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Rochester. In addition to Grievous Entanglement, her work has appeared in ELH, MELUS, Arizona Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, and the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (2023).
Refreshments provided.
