Contact Information
Olivia Barnard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History. She researches the history of the Gulf South in early America, focusing on the history of slavery and the history of the Atlantic slave trade. She received her Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University.
Her current work, “Stories of the St. Ursin: Unraveling the Last Slave Voyage to French Colonial Louisiana” focuses on the last known slave ship sent to Louisiana while France controlled the colony. The St. Ursin reached New Orleans in late August of 1743 with approximately one hundred and ninety African survivors from the Senegambian region of West Africa. Diverging from typical narratives of slave voyages that follow the ship from coast to coast across the Atlantic Ocean, “Stories of the St. Ursin” approaches the history of the final voyage to the French colony of Louisiana through a thematic lens. Each chapter forefronts new people who experienced the journey of the voyage through time, geographies, and archives while interrogating major themes in the history of the Atlantic slave trade such as survival, information collection, and kinship.
Her work has appeared in Louisiana History and Scholarly Editing. Broadly, she is interested in the digital humanities, archives, paleography, and translation.