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Walter Johnson Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis , History Ph.D. 1995, Princeton University Email:  wj1@nyu.edu

Areas of Research/Interest: Southern history; African American history; slavery.

Select Publications:

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery, Capitalism, and Imperialism in the MississippiValley (Harvard University Press, forthcoming)

The Chattel Principle : Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (Yale University Press. February 8, 2005) 

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999)

• Francis B. Simkins Award (co-winner), Southern Historical Association, 2001
• John Hope Franklin Prize, American Studies Association, 2000
• SHEAR Book Prize, Society of Historians of the Early AmericanRepublic, 2000
• Frederick Jackson Turner Prize (co-winner), Organization of American Historians, 2000
• Avery O. Craven Prize, Organization of American Historians 2000
• Selection, History Book Club, 1999
• Thomas J. Wilson Prize, Harvard University Press, 1999

"Whispers and Shadows: the Broken Narrative of Stolen Lives", Lincoln Center Theater Review, No. 40 (Winter/Spring 2005), 14-16.

"The Future Store" in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle, 1-34.

"The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question", Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 2004), 299-308.

“On Agency,” Journal of Social History (Fall 2003), 113-124.

“James Oakes and the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery” inWinthropJordan, ed., New Perspectives on American Slavery (Oxford,MS: TheUniversity ofMississippi Press, 2003).

“Time and Revolution in AfricanAmerica,” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 3:3 (Summer/Fall 2001), 83-101.  Reprinted in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: TheUniversity ofCalifornia Press, 2002) and Kathleen Wilson, ed., The New Imperial History (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004).

“A Nettlesome Classic Turns Twenty-Five: Re-Reading Eugene D. Genovese’sRoll, Jordan, Roll” in Common-Place (www.common-place.org) June 2001.

“Asking Questions, Reading Bodies” (excerpt from Soul by Soul) in Mark M. Smith, ed., The Old South (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000).

“Possible Pasts: Some Speculations on Time, Temporality, and the History of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Amerikastudien/American Studies, 45:4 (December 2000).

“The White Slave, the Slave Trader, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s South”, Journal of American History, 87:1 (June 2000), 13-38.

"Inconsistency, Contradiction, and Complete Confusion: The Everyday Life of the Law of Slavery”, Law and Social Inquiry, 22:2 (Spring 1997), 405-33.

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