Becca AponteGraduate Student

I am a second-year doctoral student in African History, with interests in emancipation, labor, and law in the French empire. My research takes a close look at how women wove and were woven into the financial and familial networks of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Senegal. In tracing their claims to legal liberation, property, income shares, labor compensation, and basic provisions, I ask how gendered economic relations and access figure within the formation of local familial networks. More broadly, I question how these networks and interpersonal conflicts influenced colonial market relations.

Outside of this work, I am also a team member of the Senegal Liberations Project, a digital humanities collaborative (formerly) funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This work analyzes the liberation records of 28,930 enslaved Africans who sought freedom between 1857 and 1903. Our forthcoming article, “Runaway Enslaved Families in Senegal: Mothers, Children, Resistance, and Vulnerabilities, 1857–1903,” will be made available in Slavery & Abolition.

In addition, my writing has been recognized by the American Historical Association for the Raymond J. Cunningham Prize, Stanford University’s Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education for the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts, and the France-Stanford Center for the Josephine Baker Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize.

Finally, when I am not filing through the archives or typing on the computer, I can be found in search of a great coffee shop or bakery, attempting my own latte art, thrifting for vintage clothing, listening to folk or jazz music, and reading some high fantasy book.