Faculty Fellow

Christopher Taylor

Associate Professor, English Language and Literature University of Chicago

Biography

Christopher Taylor's research and teaching focus on the hemispheric Americas in the nineteenth century. While the British West Indies is his primary area of focus, he is interested in how these islands were linked to worlds beyond the boundaries of the British Empire. Working at the edges of economic history, political theory, and literary studies, Taylor studies how West Indian creoles drew on the ideas and texts that circulated through these entangled worlds to develop norms and model polities opposed to slavery, economic liberalism, and expansionist imperialism. Taylor is the author of Empire of Neglect: Imagining the Americas in a Liberal Age (Duke University Press, 2018).

To learn more about Christopher Taylor's research and publications, please visit his profile page at the Department of English.

chtaylor@uchicago.edu

Topics

Featured Project

Colored Troops, Under General Wild, Liberating Slaves in North Carolina, from Harper’s Weekly, January 23, 1864.

Practices of Emancipation

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2019 – 2020

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Projects

Practices of Emancipation II

The second phase of a project studying links between Union Army enlistment and the emancipation of slaves is focused on linking African American soldiers to a database of freed people in Civil War refugee camps.

Practices of Emancipation is a multi-year collaborative research project that is building a linked online database and interactive map containing records of over 100,000 African Americans in the Civil War era. The goal is to deepen our understanding of the agency of enslaved people in their own...

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2020 – 2022

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Slavery and Visual Culture

Slavery and Visual Culture

This interdisciplinary project builds on research conducted by the UChicago Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture to help formalize the group’s contributions to scholarship about the histories of slavery and visuality.

The Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture is a transdisciplinary project that explores the relationships between visuality and regimes of racialization during slavery and its afterlives. Transhistorical and comparative in character, the project examines the visual imagining of slavery and...

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2020 – 2023

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Visual Arts

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Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives

Titus Kaphar, Behind the Myth of Benevolence, 2014.

Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives

This project will investigate how visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world have underwritten or organized contemporary modes of seeing black bodies.

This project gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars who, in the context of closed seminars, public events, and digital exhibits, will investigate how visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world have underwritten modes of seeing Black bodies beyond...

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2021 – 2023

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