Jennifer K Stinson
Professor of History
History (PM)
Brown Hall
B306
(989) 9642103
jstinson@svsu.edu
Biography
I am an historian of the United States, whose interests include race, gender, the environment, and public history. Much of my work focuses on the nineteenth century, but it also extends into other eras. The book I am writing is on African-American, African-French, and Ojibwe-African families, as well as those whose lives bridged African diasporic and southeastern Native American identities. I trace their lives along fur trade routes, in mining camps, on farms, and in small towns in the nineteenth-century rural Midwest. Some members of these families endured and resisted slavery or long-term indentured servitude; others lived and thrived in freedom. The stories I tell about them form part of my larger focus on social history—the history of ordinary women, men, and children. Social historians patiently piece the past together from census records, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, oral histories, old photographs, and every other hard to read piece of paper or blurry image you can imagine. We do so based upon the conviction that ordinary people’s lives had and still have intrinsic value. We strive particularly to better understand groups whose histories have been partly erased by state-enforced illiteracy and by prejudices pertaining to poverty, gender, and race.
I am currently serving a two-year term as vice president of the Midwestern History Association, and I will assume leadership as president in summer 2026. The MHA is a professional organization that seeks to advance knowledge of the region in historical and interdisciplinary perspective. As part of the MHA leadership, I aim to broaden the organization's inclusivity and diversity, regarding scholarship and membership, and to support emerging scholars. MHA members, whose research and careers have followed academic, K-12, public history, and non-traditional pathways, are at the forefront of crafting new visions of the region's richness, complexity, and significance. I am eager to see the organization grow and to reckon continually with histories and legacies that center race, gender, sexuality, Indigeneity, and settler colonialism and that view the Midwest through an intersectional, transnational, and diasporic lens.
My public history work stems from a life-long love of museums, genealogy, and old houses. I am especially interested in the challenges that arise when people aim to represent their own or other people’s links to the past in the news, historic sites, museums, parks, and community spaces, particularly when race, ethnicity, women's lives, or migration is at stake. My interest in environmental history is rooted in a passion for animals, farmers markets, and the great outdoors, as well as concerns out climate change, environmental racism, and natural disasters. Through innovative historic preservation efforts and community commitment, I believe that preserving our past and sustaining our planet can go hand-in-hand. I currently teach a course on environmental injustice.
I work closely with SVSU's College of Education, serving as one of several regular History Department liaisons to it. In that capacity, I draw upon my years as a high school teacher and my experience working with middle-school-aged young people. At SVSU, I have lead MTTC preparation sessions, and I am also delighted to talk with aspiring history and social studies teachers about their goals in the classroom. I currently teach both the grades 5-9 and grades 7-12 Social Studies classes.
Education
Oberlin College
Doctor of Philosophy
Indiana University
Teaching Interests
Since joining the fulltime faculty of SVSU in 2011, I have offered courses on: the U.S. to 1877, Introduction to Historical Study, Michigan History, the History of Work, the History of the Natural Disaster and Epidemics in the U.S., American Frontier History, Public History, Western Environmental History (Honors College), Environmental Injustice (History Dept. and Honors College), Intro. to Gender (Gender Studies minor), and Social Studies Education (History Dept. and College of Education).
My other teaching experience includes African American History, U.S. Women’s History, the History of the American South, Gender Across Cultures in the U.S. and Africa, and Music History.
Research
Recent Publications:
“African American, African-Indian, and Midwestern,” Middle West Review, 7:1 (Fall 2020): 57-68.
“Becoming Black, White, and Indian in Wisconsin Farm County,” Middle West Review: Special Issue-The Indigenous Midwest, James F. Brooks and Douglas Kiel eds., 2:2 (Spring 2016), 53-84.
“Black Bondspeople, White Masters and Mistresses, and the Americanization of the Upper Mississippi River Lead District,” Journal of Global Slavery, 1:2 (Oct. 2016), 165-95.
"Bondage and Resistance in the Land of Lead: Antebellum Upper Mississippi River Valley Mineral Country Landscapes," Slavery & Abolition, Forum: Slavery and Landscape, Issue 1 (March 2017) online.
“Bondage and the Americanization of the Mississippi Valley” in Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, Jeff Fynn-Paul and Damian Alan Pargas, eds., Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden-Brill, 2018.
Book manuscript in progress: “They All Mixed in Together, the White and the Colored”: Freedom, Family, and the Emergence of Race in the Rural Upper Midwest, 1820-1920.
Selected Presentations:
Panel co-organizer/presenter: “All I had of my mother’s, he took from me”: Free Black Women’s Property and Kinship Struggles at Pleasant Ridge, Wisconsin,” Association for the Study of African American Life & History Conference, Oct. 2021.
Panel presenter/chair: “The Two-Hundred Pound Servant on the Dock: Creating a First White Man Founder and Erasing a Black Man in Bondage in Early Wisconsin,” Midwestern History Association Conference, Virtual, May 26, 2021.
Discussant/Chair: Screening of documentary film "CURED." MHA, 2021.
“Lewis Washginton’s ‘That’s the Man for Me’: Music, Manhood, and Nineteenth-Century Midwestern Activism,” Midwestern History Association-sponsored lightning round panel on race in the Midwest, OAH Annual Convention, March 2021.
“‘Free Colored’ Midwestern-Southern Pioneer Travelers: Mapping James Roberts’s 1830 Letter and the Shepard Family 1850s Correspondence,” International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture Conference, Detroit, MI, Oct. 9-12, 2019.
“An Antebellum ‘Green Book’ for ‘Free Colored’ Midwestern-Southern Travelers: Mapping James Roberts’s 1830 Letter” Association for the Study of African American History and Life Convention, Charleston, SC, Oct. 2-6. 2019.
Roundtable Discussant, “Being Midwestern in the Nineteenth Century: Regionalism in the Nascent Midwest,” Midwestern History Conference, Grand Rapids, MI, May 30-21, 2019.
“‘When I receive the peaces of your dress, it seems [like] some body that was dear and risen again’: Freedom, Migration and Loss for Antebellum African American Families,” Loss - A Symposium, McGill University, Montreal Canada, May 9-10 2019.
“‘That’s the Man for Me’: The Textual and Musical Abolitionism and Civil Rights Activism of Lewis Washington,” Slavery, Authorship and Literary Culture Workshop, Maison française, Columbia University, New York, Jan. 24-26, 2019.
Panel Chair, “Resistance, Borders, and the Politics of Slavery in the Great Lakes Region,” Society for Historians of the Early Republic Annual Meeting, Cleveland, July 11-22, 2019.
“Black Slaves and Indentured Servants, Indian Women Miners, White Masters and Mistresses, and the U.S. Americanization of New French and British North American Slaving and Quasi-Slaving Zones,” Cultural Identities, Ideologies and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery Conference, University of Leiden, The Netherlands, June 2015.
"Black Slaves and Indian Women Miners: Making Race, Resisting Bondage, and Americanizing the Midwest,” Many Faces of Slavery: Non-Traditional Slave Holding in the Atlantic World conference, University of Montpellier, France, May 2015.
“Slavery, Servitude, and Race in the Northwest Territory, U.S. Midwest, and Canada, 1700s-1800s,” panel, Social Science History Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Nov. 2014.
“Slavery in the Constitution and Everyday Life” SRC Hochschule (University), Heidelberg, Germany, Jan. 2013, Legal History Block Seminar Instructor.
“Bound to the Land and ‘Bound himself or herself to me’: African American Indentured Servants and Resistance in the Nineteenth-Century Frontier Midwest, North American Labor History Conference, Detroit, MI, Oct. 2012.
“The Work of Race: African American and African-Indian Farmers, Farm Laborers, and Indentured Servants in the Old Northwest,” Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives series, Michigan State University, Lansing, MI, Feb. 2012.
“Singing Freedom on the Stage: Women, Gender and Resistance in Recent American Operas about Slavery,” Association for the Study of African American Life and History Convention, Richmond, VA, Oct. 2011.
“Ties and Divides in the Great Lakes Fur Trade: Race, Gender, and the African-Ojibwe-French Bonga Family,” Organization of American Historians Conference, Houston, TX, March 2011.
“Mixed-Race Families, Malleable Identities, and Historical Memory: Rethinking Race in the Midwest and Beyond,” Organization of American Historians Conference, Seattle, WA, March 2009.
“The Cemetery in the Living History Museum: Race, Nostalgia, and Living Pasts in Midwestern African American History,” The International Conference on the Inclusive Museum, Leiden, The Netherlands, June 2008.
Community Engagement
Selected Guest Scholar Presentations:
Keynote Speaker: Galena History Symposium, Galena, Ill., May 15-16, 2026.
:EXPLORE THE LANDSCAPE: HISTORY OF BLACK AGRICULTURE IN WISCONSIN Guest speaker for food history virtual picnic event: African-Cherokee-Lumbee Women and Farm Families in Vernon County, Wisconsin.
"Unfree in the Diggings: Discovering Black Slaves and Servants around Sinsinawa and How They Made Wisconsin," Sinsinawa Mound Center, Wisconsin, April 2021.
"Unearthing the African American Dream in the Nineteenth-Century Rural Midwest," OLLI, Feb. 13, 2019.
“Enslaved African Americans in the Antebellum Midwest,” Castle Museum, Saginaw, MI, Feb. 2016.
“From Picnics and Parties to Midwives and Marriage: Women’s Social Worlds and the Making of African-Indian-European Families and Communities in Rural Wisconsin Cheyenne Valley Settlers Association Community Reunion, Hillsboro, Wisconsin, July 2009.
Leadership
Vice President/President-Elect, Midwestern History Association (MHA)
Advisory Board Member, Women's Environmental History Network (WEHN)