I'm Dr. Angela Sutton (she/her), and I'm a historian.
My first book, Pirates of the Slave Trade: The Battle of Cape Lopez and the Birth of an American Institution, came out in October of 2023.
I am both German and American, and I grew up on US Army bases overseas. My first historic memory is the fall of the Berlin Wall. I went to the University of Stirling in Scotland to study history. Thanks to the Scottish government, I graduated with no student loans (all should be so fortunate), and then worked as a research assistant for a maritime museum: The Tall Ship Glenlee in Glasgow. I moved to the U.S. South to do an M.A. and Ph.D. in Atlantic History at Vanderbilt University. My dissertation grapples with the mercantile culture of the West African slave trade, i.e., piracy and human trafficking.
My first job out of grad school was adjuncting- I taught Sea Power in History to NROTC students from Belmont University, Tennessee State University, and Vanderbilt University. Hooyah!
I then helped manage projects at the Slave Societies Digital Archive, which digitally preserves endangered documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies (like the U.S., but also in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa). It was there where the grave magnitude of historical disparity truly sank in: the archive contains millions of entries about people who lived full, eventful lives whose names and contributions hadn't ever been spoken out loud or written about in the modern era. That is, until small groups of intrepid historians, archivists, students, and volunteers intervened to make these records accessible for the first time through the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme.
So much of the history that we read today is incomplete because the sources about the Africans and their descendants all over the world have not been treated with the same care as those of Europeans & our descendants. This has harmed all of us— it has resulted in the proliferation of partial narratives of our shared past. It has created a world where only some of us have the privilege of knowing where we are from, and the humility of understanding how much we don't know.
My passion is retelling our local, national, and international narratives with the inclusion of this neglected and under-utilized source material. A lot of that involves gathering that source material, transcribing it, creating datasets from it, and making it accessible through digital archives and databases, as well as collecting and preserving the oral histories of descendant populations so readers and researchers can see and use the evidence themselves. I've been fortunate to be funded often and well by granting agencies whose missions overlap with my own.
Anyone who makes these types of archival interventions will tell you that when you're working in these records and with descendants, the stories almost tell themselves. They fill in what is missing from the history you were allowed to know growing up, and change the way you see everything around you. Your whole understanding of self changes, and I want to do some of that work with my readers.
I now work as a research assistant professor in the Department of Communication of Science and Technology at Vanderbilt University, and as the Assistant Dean of Graduate Education and Academic Affairs in the College of Arts & Science. I am also a Board Member of the Friends of Fort Negley.
My next book project is about a Civil War fortification in Nashville, Tennessee: the UNESCO site of memory, Fort Negley.
My first book, Pirates of the Slave Trade: The Battle of Cape Lopez and the Birth of an American Institution, came out in October of 2023.
I am both German and American, and I grew up on US Army bases overseas. My first historic memory is the fall of the Berlin Wall. I went to the University of Stirling in Scotland to study history. Thanks to the Scottish government, I graduated with no student loans (all should be so fortunate), and then worked as a research assistant for a maritime museum: The Tall Ship Glenlee in Glasgow. I moved to the U.S. South to do an M.A. and Ph.D. in Atlantic History at Vanderbilt University. My dissertation grapples with the mercantile culture of the West African slave trade, i.e., piracy and human trafficking.
My first job out of grad school was adjuncting- I taught Sea Power in History to NROTC students from Belmont University, Tennessee State University, and Vanderbilt University. Hooyah!
I then helped manage projects at the Slave Societies Digital Archive, which digitally preserves endangered documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies (like the U.S., but also in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa). It was there where the grave magnitude of historical disparity truly sank in: the archive contains millions of entries about people who lived full, eventful lives whose names and contributions hadn't ever been spoken out loud or written about in the modern era. That is, until small groups of intrepid historians, archivists, students, and volunteers intervened to make these records accessible for the first time through the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme.
So much of the history that we read today is incomplete because the sources about the Africans and their descendants all over the world have not been treated with the same care as those of Europeans & our descendants. This has harmed all of us— it has resulted in the proliferation of partial narratives of our shared past. It has created a world where only some of us have the privilege of knowing where we are from, and the humility of understanding how much we don't know.
My passion is retelling our local, national, and international narratives with the inclusion of this neglected and under-utilized source material. A lot of that involves gathering that source material, transcribing it, creating datasets from it, and making it accessible through digital archives and databases, as well as collecting and preserving the oral histories of descendant populations so readers and researchers can see and use the evidence themselves. I've been fortunate to be funded often and well by granting agencies whose missions overlap with my own.
Anyone who makes these types of archival interventions will tell you that when you're working in these records and with descendants, the stories almost tell themselves. They fill in what is missing from the history you were allowed to know growing up, and change the way you see everything around you. Your whole understanding of self changes, and I want to do some of that work with my readers.
I now work as a research assistant professor in the Department of Communication of Science and Technology at Vanderbilt University, and as the Assistant Dean of Graduate Education and Academic Affairs in the College of Arts & Science. I am also a Board Member of the Friends of Fort Negley.
My next book project is about a Civil War fortification in Nashville, Tennessee: the UNESCO site of memory, Fort Negley.
