Kerry Sinanan on Representations of Women, Motherhood and Breastfeeding in British Slavery

Monday, January 29, 2018

Kerry Sinanan joins Thomas Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss representations of women, motherhood and breastfeeding in paintings depicting British slavery.


Kerry Sinanan, joined the University of West England in 2005 and is currently Senior Lecturer in the Long Eighteenth Century. Before this she was an Early Career Research Fellow in Romanticism at Oxford Brookes and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Moore Institute, NUI, Galway where she worked on a collaborative panel on the literatures produced by cross-cultural travel. She completed her Ph.D. in 2003 at Trinity College Dublin.Her current research explores the intersections between representations and discourses of slavery, colonial identity, travel and transatlanticism, ethnography, selfhood and representations of ‘race’ in the literature of the long eighteenth century, and Romanticism. Dr. Sinanan co-edited, with Tim Milnes, Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Her article “The Feelings of an Officer: John Stedman in Suriname,” appeared in Farr and Guegan, eds, The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century.


Kerry’s Recommended Resources

  1. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Book on Amazon

  2. Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Book on Amazon
  3. Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement. Picturing the British West-Indies, 1700-1840. New Haven: Yale University Press: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. 2008. Book on Amazon