Fellowship / Fellows

Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant

  • 2022–2023
  • History
  • Radcliffe Institute Fellow
  • Amherst College
Elizabeth Herbin-Triant
Photo by Lou Jones

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant is an associate professor of Black studies and history at Amherst College. Her research combines the fields of African American history and the history of capitalism.  

While at Radcliffe, Herbin-Triant will work on her book project “Spindles and Slavery: Abolitionists, Anti-Abolitionists, and the Business of Manufacturing Cotton Grown by the Enslaved.” This project tells the story of antebellum Lowell, Massachusetts—a place deeply tied to the South’s “peculiar institution” and shaped by competing currents of antislavery activism and anti-abolitionism. Through an examination of the economic, political, and social ties connecting investors in Lowell’s textile factories to enslavers in the South, this project explores how some northerners helped to support the institution of slavery even as others—including fugitives from slavery residing in Lowell—worked to bring an end to slavery. 

Herbin-Triant’s publications include Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods (Columbia University Press, 2019) and opinion pieces in Greensboro News & Record, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and Winston-Salem Journal. Herbin-Triant received an AB in history and literature from Harvard College and a PhD in history from Columbia University. Her research has been supported by institutions including the Massachusetts Historical Society and Yale University.

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