Drop-in Hours: by appointment only

Dr. Rachael L. Pasierowska earned a PhD at Rice University, Texas, and the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, in History specialising in animal and slavery studies. Her research focusses on the interactions between enslaved Africans in the 19th-century Atlantic world (Brazil, Cuba, and the U.S. South) and animals. She is especially interested in comparative studies of slavery across the Atlantic World and enslaved Africans’ identities and thought processes. Her research also encompasses environmental history, medical history, and the cosmological worlds of enslaved Africans. She earned a MS from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in Slavery and Forced Labour.

Rachael has been awarded fellowships from all over the U.S., including the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, The Huntington, and The Smithsonian. She has presented at tertiary institutions from across three continents in both English and Portuguese. She is the author of several articles and is working on her first book project that explores animals and slavery in a comparative Atlantic context.

Online Bibliography to Pre-C19 Travel Narratives Index

Online Bibliography to Pre-C19 Travel Narratives : Africa, Brazil, Cuba, U.S.

Teaching

Classes taught include:

• HIST:1040 – Diversity in History: Folklore in the African American Atlantic World
• HIST:1040 – Diversity in History: Middle Passages: The Forced Journeys of Enslaved Africans,1500-1865
• HIST:2267 – African American History to 1877 
• HIST:3171 – Slavery in World History
• HIST:3275 – History of Slavery in the U.S.A.
• Independent Reading: Maritime History and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Awards & Service

Fellowships include:

• 2019 – The Huntington Library Short-Term Research Fellowship Program (Unfulfilled due to Covid-19)
• 2019 – African American Religious Studies Forum Fellowship Program, Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning
• 2019 – Fondren Library Research Fellow working on the Red Book of Houston, 1915
• 2018-2019 – Smithsonian Libraries Baird Society Resident Scholar Program
• 2018-2019 – Friends of the Princeton University Library Research Grant Program
• 2018-2019 – Library Resident Research Fellow at the American Philosophical Society
• 2016-2017 Goizueta Foundation Graduate Fellowship, awarded for research in the Cuban Heritage Collections, University of Miami
• 2017 – James T. Wagoner ’29 Foreign Study Scholarship, awarded for research in Cuba (March 2017- May 2017), Rice University (Unfulfilled due to Covid-19)
• 2014 – Research Fellowship for Travel to Brazil, Rice University
• 2013 – Ora N. Arnold Endowment for Travel to Brazil
• 2013 – Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace: Investing in the Study of Critical   Languages, Middlebury College
• 2009 – PGCE Bursary, French and German 11-18, Canterbury Christ Church University

Awards include:

• Champion Teacher of Student Success, The University of Iowa, November 2022
• Captain Charles Septimus Longcope Award in History for the Best Completed Ph.D. Dissertation, Rice University, April 2021
• Best Paper Prize for the Reflecting Black Fall Research Symposium, Commemorating 400 Hundred Years of African American History, University of Houston-Downtown, October 2019
• Mary Hayes Ewing Prize for Best Article in Southern History, Rice University, April 2017 and, April 2015
• Best Paper Prize for the 2013 Graduate History Conference, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, May 2013
• Ian Thompson Award for Creativity and Innovation in the Classroom, Canterbury Christ Church University, February 2011

Publications

Articles

• "This is a Thoroughbred Boy: Exploring the lives of slave children and animals" in Animals and Race
• "All aboard the King George and Happy Captive: European shipnaming practices in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, 1750–1755"
• “'I wuz like a petty dog': White Animalization of Enslaved Blacks" in Critical Race Studies Across the Disciplines: Resisting Racism Through Scholactivism
• "Atlantic History from the Saddle: The Role of Horses in the Slave-Trading Atlantic World,” in Outside the Anthropological Machine: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies
• "Screech Owls Allus Holler ’round the House before Death': Birds and the Souls of Black Folk in the 1930s American South" in the Journal of Social History, Vol 51, Issue 1, Fall 2017
• "Up from Childhood: When African-American Enslaved Children Learned of Their Servile Status"

Commentary and Popular Writing

• Review of Berger, Eugene C. This Incurable Evil: Mapuche Resistance to Spanish Enslavement, 1598–1687
• Review of Jonathan White's "A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House"
• Review of "The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South" by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh
• Review of "American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation," by Roberto Saba in History, Vol. 108