Jennifer Dorsey

Dr. Dorsey has been teaching colonial and Revolutionary America at Siena College since 2008. 

Her research interests are in the history of the early American republic and her scholarship focuses on African American history and labor history.  Presently, she is finishing a book-length study of former slaves in post-Revolutionary Maryland, tentatively titled After Slavery that will be published by Cornell University Press in 2011.  In the summer of 2005, she participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities' sponsored seminar "Roots: African Dimensions of the History and Culture of the Americas" at the University of Virginia.  

 

In 2003, she was awarded the National Historic and Public Records Commission's post-doctoral Fellowship in Documentary Editing.  During her post-doctoral fellowship, she worked with Professor Loren Schweninger, 1999 Pulitzer Prize award nominee and director of The Race and Slavery Petitions Project.  In December 2009 Dr. Dorsey's article "A Documentary History of African American Freedom: An Introduction to the Race, Slavery and Free Blacks Microfilm Collection," appeared in Slavery Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Societies.  The article offers an introduction to the microfilm collection, and identifies how the petition testimonies included in this unusual collection can inform our understanding of African American freedom before emancipation.

 

Before assuming her current position, Dr. Dorsey was an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University.