Urvashi Chakravarty on Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England

Thomas Thurston talks with Urvashi Chakravarty on her work titled “Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England.”

Urvashi Chakravarty is an assistant professor of English Literature at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. She received her Ph.D. in English in December 2010 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she also held an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Her publications include:

“Race, Natality, and the Biopolitics of Early Modern Political Theology” in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18.2 (Spring 2018): 140-166.

“‘I Had Peopled Else’: Shakespeare’s Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race,” in Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture, eds. Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Albert Johnston (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 57-78.

“More Than Kin, Less Than Kind: Similitude, Strangeness, and Early Modern English Homonationalisms,” in a special issue on Shakespeare and Race, eds. Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall, in Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (Spring 2016): 14-29.

Recommended Resources:

Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

“Slavery and Its Legacies” is available on iTunes and SoundCloud. Email comments and suggestions to gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu with subject line “podcast”