Louise Bourgeois Essay Prize

Lucy Stark is a History PhD student in the Transnational, Global, and International (TIG) field with a focus on French colonialism in the Caribbean, Louisiana, and West Africa. Her research interests center on gender, childhood, race, labor, and slavery. Lucy is a Graduate Student Co-Chair of the Slavery & Freedom Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center and was elected by fellow graduate students as the History Department Graduate Student Representative. She has worked on historical documentary films to highlight stories of overlooked men and women of the past in the French speaking world and hopes to use her interest in filmmaking and public history to share academic research with a wider audience. Lucy’s prize-winning paper, “Capturing, Selling, Using, and Liberating: The Four Acts of Senegalese Childhood Slavery in the Late 1850s,” explores evidence for the capture and liberation of children in the Senegal Libération Registers from 1857-1859. As Lucy demonstrates, a significant majority (110 of 160) of the liberations during these years were for minors (often girls). By focusing on the adults who appear most often in these records, either as traders or as guardians, Lucy reveals a “coerced child labor regime” in which liberation labor was virtually indistinguishable from enslaved labor for children. As she shows in this richly researched and nuanced account, France’s 1848 abolition decree had little effect along the Senegal River, where the buying and selling of enslaved peoples continued in a trade from which French citizens often indirectly benefited.