History Department Faculty
Mycah Conner
Assistant Professor
Mycah Conner
Contact
Stokes Hall Room S313
Email: connermy@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., Columbia University, 2011
- Ph.D., Harvard University, 2021
Research Interests
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. social history; African-American
history; slavery and emancipation in the U.S.; the Civil War; Reconstruction;
southern history; midwestern history; labor; violence
Department
Biography
Mycah Conner is a historian of the nineteenth-century U.S., whose research, writing, and teaching focus on slavery, emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Her manuscript, On this Bare Ground: The Ordeal of Freedpeople’s Camps and the Making of Emancipation in the Civil War West, is a history of the battles for freedom and self-determination in the Western and Trans-Mississippi Theaters of the war, which interprets emancipation with the West as its starting point. It examines the westward “camps” of self-emancipated people in relation to other places, and as sites of existential struggle, betrayal, death-dealing, confiscation, and dispossession. Centrally, it is a study of freedpeople’s defenses of their futures, their children, and other kin—in the face of cupidity, indifference, and bold and innovative cruelty.
Professor Conner holds broader interests in social histories of the South, the Midwest, and the ways in which a westward shift of focus can change generalities and conventional metaphors within histories of emancipation and subsequent freedom struggles. For a second project, she is interested in the lives of aging or elderly freedpeople in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Her work has been supported by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the Politics of Kinship at Tufts University, and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University, where she was a 2021-2023 postdoctoral scholar.