Sue Peabody

Sue Peabody is Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at Washington State University, and author of numerous books and articles on slavery, race and the law in France and its colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford, 1996) explores the presence of blacks in eighteenth-century Paris and French legal discourse around race and slavery. A series of articles and books in English and French explore the legal principle of “free soil,” whereby slaves achieved free status by crossing state boundaries, in France and in other parts of the Atlantic World. Her prize-winning book, Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies (Oxford, 2017), is the biography of a family founded by a Bengali slave, Madeleine, in Isle Bourbon (Réunion) and Isle de France (Mauritius), 1750-1850. It was adapted in French as, Les enfants de Madeleine, translated by Pierre H. Boulle, Centre International des Recherches sur l’ESClavage (CIRESC) (Karthala, 2019). She consults on documentaries and the museum exhibit, “L’Étrange histoire de Furcy Madeleine,” by the Musée historique de Villèle. Her current book projects include: The Failure of the Succès: Anatomy of a Slave Smuggling Voyage, and I Am Not A Refugee: An African Writer’s Struggle for Human Rights, with Abdelmoneim Rahamtalla and illustrated by Lena Merhej.