Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart
Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart, assistant professor of history in the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at The University of Texas at Dallas, has been awarded a pair of research fellowships to study at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
She is among 23 George Washington Presidential Library fellows who will be conducting research that will foster a better understanding of the history of colonial America, the Revolutionary War era and early America. She will be in residence for three months at the Washington Library, which is not open to the public.
Stewart will be doing similar research at Monticello as a Batten and First Union Domestic Fellow. She will spend two months at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, where she will have access to Monticello’s staff and research holdings at the Jefferson Library.
“I’ll be reading through letters, diaries and agricultural journals of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity.”
Stewart is working on an upcoming book that will explore the intertwined relationship of wine and slavery during the nation’s first century, and the centrality of this connection to labor, freedom, capitalism and American identity in the 19th century.
Her first book, This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations, examines how both enslaved and enslaving residents of plantations in the 19th-century U.S. South used their environment and material culture to make a home. The book won the 2024 Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book from the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL), a nonprofit honor society that celebrates Texas literature and recognizes distinctive literary achievement. She will be honored at the TIL awards ceremony May 4 in The Woodlands, Texas.
This is a truncated version of an article that originally appeared in the UT Dallas News Center.