NICOLE E. VIGLINI

Greetings! I am a historian of the nineteenth-century United States; I specialize in histories of slavery, capitalism, gender, and legal cultural histories. I received my Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 2023. Currently, I am a postdoctoral scholar at the Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University, where I am working to turn my dissertation into a book manuscript. My project explores the ways in which antebellum southern women of different social and legal statuses leveraged their property and their community networks to gain financial credibility in a slave society, and centers the testimony of propertied Black women who filed claims to compensation before the Southern Claims Commission, a federal organization created in 1871 to reimburse unionist southerners in seceded states for property confiscated by the United States Army during the Civil War.

 

I am also at work on a digital project, which aims to bring visibility to Black women's economic contributions during the Civil War, and which reconceptualizes southern monuments and other commemorative landscapes by placing them in conversation with SCC claimants' testimony and other documents and images. 

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My work has been supported by the American Historical Association, the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, LSU Libraries, the Briscoe Center at UT Austin, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University.