Nik Ribianszky

My primary research interests in general are 17th to 19th century African American history, particularly focused on free people of African descent prior to the Civil War, race relations, and American women's history.

My first current book project, Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865, is coming out in March 2021 through the University Press of Georgia. Generations of Freedom explores the lives of free people of color using the complementary lenses of violence, gender, kinship, and migration. I begin my analysis at the height of Spanish colonial rule in 1779 and traces the inextricably intertwined nature of freedom, movement, and violence for free people of color through the end of legal slavery in 1865. This transgenerational study locates free people of color within the historical context of several communities and examines the gendered vulnerabilities free people of color faced that qualified their basic freedoms—including their ability to own property, find employment, and function as parents and spouses. Yet that is merely part of the story, as the most critical aspects of the free experience are their efforts to persevere and survive under the most adverse of conditions. Under both the Spanish—who provided free people of color more freedom than their French predecessors—and the more-restrictive Americans, free people of color resisted through parenting, property ownership, marriage, and court battles to define themselves and their freedom. In so doing they etched out lives, families, businesses, and rich traditions.  

Another outgrowth of the monograph has been the creation of the Natchez Database of Free People of Color the Natchez Index of Free Individuals and Families of Color. Through the process of archival research, I culled relevant information for this project from a vast swath of records that include: Adams County chancery, circuit, and probate court records, Mississippi state court records, personal letters, family papers, wills, deeds, newspapers, Spanish colonial papers, tax records, and census data, among others. The database records the name of every free black individual who surfaced in the record, and contains demographic characteristics like gender, age, color, property ownership, occupation, and literacy, among others in the database. It also notes if they suffered violence in the form of: assaults/battery, imprisonment, rape, re-enslavement, and the like. The Index is a transcription of every document and is organized alphabetically by surname when known or by first name. Currently, it stands at approximately 500 single-spaced, typewritten pages. Both will be published digitally on a companion website through UGA Press.

Creating the database and index revealed critical patterns regarding intergenerational familial relationships, movement, and violence. The expansion and digitalization of both will disseminate the research to other scholars of enslaved and free people of color and link this project with data from different geographical regions, an endeavor that gives scholars working on transnational, comparative studies of freedom quick access to relevant demographic information. But perhaps most importantly, it will be a public platform which will provide resources to those people of African descent who may be doing genealogical work to access records on their ancestors.

I also work with Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, a project housed at Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University, in partnership with the MSU Department of History and scholars at multiple institutions. I work as an editor for Enslaved’s Journal of Slavery & Data Preservation in the review process for other database projects. I am also included in their application for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, “Expanding Enslaved Hub: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade.” If it is successful, my participation in the project would include contributing my “The Natchez Database of Free People of Color” to Enslaved.org and consulting with the project to forge relationships and partnerships to advance the goals of our synergistic work especially through engagements with multiple audiences, stakeholders, and collaborators including genealogists, scholars, libraries, archives, museums, universities, public history spaces with histories of enslavement (like plantations), and descendant communities.

My next project is a comparative one that spans the African/ American/Irish diaspora. There has been exciting work done by Nini Rodgers, Jonathan Wright, and a relatively small number of scholars on Ireland its involvement in the slave trade, and anti-slavery movement. I would like to enter this growing body by examining the interaction of enslaved, free people of color, and Irish-descended people in both Ireland and North America. I will consider the range of relationships between the two groups in the Americas including shared experiences as indentured servants laboring side-by-side, allies, friends, kin, as well as those characterized by uneven power dynamics that involved the Irish as overseers, slave patrollers, or slave owners.

I teach a variety of undergraduate and MA classes in African American, race relations, gender, and US History.

Undergraduate:

HIS 1002: From Slavery to Say Her Name#: Black Women in America

HIS 1003: Whose Revolution was It?  Revolutionary America: The Long and Wide View, 1740-1790

HIS 1005: The Long Road to Black Lives Matter (team taught)

HIS 2028: The American South, 1619-1865 (team taught)

HIS 2029: The American South, 1865-2000 (team taught)

HIS 3131: From Slavery to Say Her Name#: Black Women in America

HIS 3144: African and Irish Relations in the Americas

Postgraduate:

MHY 7035: Concepts in History, MA History / MA Irish Studies, team-taught

MHY 7089: Case Studies in History: Gender and the Politics of US History

MHY 7089: Race in Another Place: A US/UK Comparative Perspective on Race, Labour, and Activism

MHY 7089: Case Studies in History: Unruly Women

MHY 7089: From The “White City” to Black Lives Matter: Public Representations of Black History in the US

MHY 7089 and 7094: Case Studies in History, US Elective: Major Themes in US History

MHY 7090: Pathways through History

MHY 7093: Approaches to History

MHY 7097: Telling Stories: Creative Approaches to History

Doctoral Supervision:

Current students:

Dr. Michael O’Connor, “The Naming and Renaming of Enslaved People by Irish Slaveholders in the British Caribbean 1664-1834” (Principal supervisor, 2024--)

Lucy McCormill, “Discourses of Race and Slavery in Irish Writing (1772-1810)” (Secondary supervisor, 2025--)

Sophie Noble, “"Stars in Little Girls' Eyes": An Intersectional History of North American Women's Figure Skating” (Secondary supervisor, 2023--)

Samantha Gowdy, “The Arkansas Civil Rights Movement 1919-1939” (Secondary supervisor, 2017--)

Past students:

Dr. Emma Taylor, “Vanished veterans: the multifaceted reasons for minimal historical representation and public commemoration of concealed female American Civil War soldiers” (Principal supervisor, Department of Education, 2025).

Dr. Barrry J. Henderson, “The Forgotten tycoon: James McHenry (1817-91) and the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad (c.1851-80) – a cosmopolitan conduit for European investment in nineteenth-century American nation-building” (Secondary supervisor, 2025)

Dr. Laura Gillespie, “‘Contraband’ camps and the development of African American politics, 1860-1865” (Secondary supervisor, Northern Ireland Department of the Economy, 2022)