I am a historian of slavery, race, and law in the early U.S. South and Atlantic World, a tenured professor of History and Law at Vanderbilt University, and a prize-winning author. I am also a 2022 laureate of the Dan David Prize (dubbed by the Washington Post as a “MacArthur style ‘genius grant’ for history”), a $300,000 cash prize “given in recognition of winners’ contribution to the study of the past and to support their future endeavors.”
As a scholar, I am interested in changing understandings of what law is and who it is for. I approach the study of the law, race, and slavery from the bottom up. We often think about rights as something given or provided through nature or statute, but my work has shown that rights are more properly imagined as capacities claimed through rhetoric—including the rhetoric of those without formal power. This interest in the intersection between law and rights and race and rhetoric has led me from examining the world of legal “outsiders,” both Black and white; to how property featured in the Black American legal imaginary; and from there to the gritty world of lending and borrowing across the color line.
As a writer, I tell stories from scraps—scraps that sit in sloppy piles in the dank basements of southern courthouses or rot in unlabeled boxes in wet storage sheds on the outskirts of towns, sharing space with roaches, rats, and feces. But it is in such scraps that we find the most hidden of voices and the most remarkable of stories.
As a scholar, I am interested in changing understandings of what law is and who it is for. I approach the study of the law, race, and slavery from the bottom up. We often think about rights as something given or provided through nature or statute, but my work has shown that rights are more properly imagined as capacities claimed through rhetoric—including the rhetoric of those without formal power. This interest in the intersection between law and rights and race and rhetoric has led me from examining the world of legal “outsiders,” both Black and white; to how property featured in the Black American legal imaginary; and from there to the gritty world of lending and borrowing across the color line.
As a writer, I tell stories from scraps—scraps that sit in sloppy piles in the dank basements of southern courthouses or rot in unlabeled boxes in wet storage sheds on the outskirts of towns, sharing space with roaches, rats, and feces. But it is in such scraps that we find the most hidden of voices and the most remarkable of stories.
Welch named a 2022 Laureate of the Dan David Prize