Susan Eva O’Donovan

Associate Professor

Email: odonovan@memphis.edu
Office: 201 Mitchell Hall
Office Hours: email for current hours
Curriculum Vitae
Website

Education

Doctor of Philosophy in History, University of California, San Diego, 1997
Master of Arts in History, University of California, San Diego, 1990
Bachelor of Arts in History, University of California, San Diego, 1987
(summa cum laude)

Fields of interest

Nineteenth Century US
Slavery and Emancipation
US Labor History
History Education

Representative publications

• Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans (New York: Penguin Press, 2026)
• Remembering the Memphis Massacre: An American Story (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2020), with Beverly G. Bond
• Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 3, vol. 2, Land and Labor, 1866–1867 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), with Anthony E. Kaye, Steven F. Miller, Leslie S. Rowland, and Stephen A. West; recipient of the 2015 Thomas Jefferson Prize
• Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 3, vol. 1, Land and Labor, 1865 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), with Steven Hahn, Steven F. Miller, John C. Rodrigue, and Leslie S. Rowland
• Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); recipient of the Organization of American Historians’ James A. Rawley Prize; recipient of the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council’s Award for Excellence in Research Using the Holdings of an Archives; finalist for the Agricultural History Society’s Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award

Current Projects:

Provisionally titled, Stocking the Deep South: The Draft Animals that Powered the Antebellum Cotton Economy, my current research takes a fresh look at the millions of mules and horses who labored alongside America’s enslaved to make cotton one of the nation’s most valuable staple economies and its largest antebellum export.  Long overlooked by historians and eclipsed by literature on scientific agriculture, steamboats, railroads, and the enslaved themselves, equids were nonetheless fundamental to the mercurial rise of the cotton economy.  There would have been no large-scale cultivation of cotton and other crops without the forced contributions of mules and horses.  There would have been no call for millions of enslaved workers either. Moreover, an investigation into the role these animals played in cotton’s mercurial rise promises to turn what has often been told as a largely eastern and Atlantic story into a continental story of violence, greed, and an international trade that carried tens of thousands of mules and horses out of the southwest and onto cotton’s frontier.