Sarah Cornell
Assistant Professor • United States
Profile
Professor Cornell joined the Department of History in 2008 and specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history. Her current project, “Americans in the U.S. South and Mexico: A Transnational History of Race, Slavery, and Freedom, 1810-1910,” traces the ideas and experiences of the diverse peoples who moved between the Southeast and Mexico. Poor and elite white southerners, enslaved and free African Americans, and Mexicans of all classes engaged in contested processes of comparing, constructing, and challenging evolving racial, labor, and political systems. By illuminating black and white Southerners' visions of themselves as members of a transnational community, she shows that Southerners' conceptualizations of race and labor did not always fall neatly into the categories of “black” and “white,” nor into those of slavery and freedom.
Education
B.A. in History and Spanish, Clark University, 2001
M.A. in History, New York University, 2003
Ph.D. in History, New York University, 2008
Research
Nineteenth-century United States; U.S. South; comparative and transnational racial and labor systems; borderlands; women and gender; U.S. empire.
Selected Publications
“Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves in Mexico, 1833-1862,” in Unshackled Spaces: Fugitives from Slavery and Maroon Communities in the Americas, ed. Barbara Krauthamer, (Yale University Press, forthcoming).
Awards
National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship for University Professors, 2011-2012
National Endowment for the Humanities, Faculty Award, 2011-2012 (declined)
Bill and Rita Clements Center Fellowship, Southern Methodist University, 2009-2010
Samuel Flagg Bemis Grant, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2009-2010
Collaborative Research Group for the Study of the Global South Fellowship, Tulane University, 2008-2009
Margaret Brown Fellowship, New York University, 2006-2007
Albert J. Beveridge Grant, American Historical Association, 2006
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2006
Southern Studies J. Carlyle Visiting Scholar Grant, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 2005
Travel Grant, Labor and Working-Class Historical Association, 2004
Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Summer Predoctoral Fellowship, New York University, 2004
MacCracken Fellowship, New York University, 2000-2006
Courses
Civil War Era
Slavery and Capitalism
U.S. History to 1877
Historiography

