Sasha Turner

Sasha Turner is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is a historian of the Caribbean, with current special interest in the period of colonialism and enslavement. She is especially interested in understanding the lives of women and children and how they navigated racial and gendered subjectivities. Her current research examines emotions as a site of gendered racial subjectivity. Tentatively titled, Slavery, Emotions, and Gender, her new research explores the role of emotion in structuring the power struggles that defined enslavement, including how enslaver and enslaved deployed emotion for social, cultural, and political goals. The preoccupation with feelings and the drawing of boundaries (albeit shifting, overlapping, contradictory, and contested) between those who could feel and those who could not, and what one should feel and how one should express feelings suggest the intersection of emotions and the construction race and gender hierarchies. She is further interested in understanding how political expediency, cultural expectations, and spiritual beliefs that structured Caribbean slave society prescribed appropriate expression of emotion defining individual belonging and community formation.