In Conversation with Dr. Tamika Nunley, "The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia"

Thursday, April 11, 2p.m. ETR

A discussion around legal paternalism and enslaved women's articulations of justice.

Join CEO Gloria L. Blackwell in conversation with AAUW American Fellowship alumna Tamika Nunley, Ph.D., as they discuss her recent book, "The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia," 1662-1865.

This book examines clemency in legal cases that involve enslaved women accused of capital crime in early Virginia. In these legal encounters, we not only see a system that worked to define and affirm a commitment to legal paternalism that upheld the rule of law, but decades of responses made by the countless enslaved women accused of capital offenses.

"The Demands of Justice" examines how these responses constituted the makings of an intellectual history of enslaved women’s articulations of justice.

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The conversation will feature Dr. Tamika Nunley, Associate Professor and Sandler Family Faculty Fellow at Cornell University:

Tamika Nunley is Associate Professor of history and the Sandler Family Faculty Fellow of American studies at Cornell University. Along with articles, essays, and reviews, she is the author of "At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C." which received the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award, the Pauli Murray Book Prize, and the Mary Kelley Book Prize.

Her article, "Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Courts," received the Letitia Woods Brown prize for best article in African American Women’s History and the Anne Braden Prize for best article in Southern Women’s History.

Nunley recently released her new book, "The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime and Clemency in Early Virginia" with the University of North Carolina Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, NewsOne, Smithsonian Magazine, Ms. Magazine, and Fortune Magazine. In 2023, the Librarian of Congress named her the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American history.

In solidarity,

Gloria L. Blackwell

Chief Executive Officer