UO law professor receives National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship

EUGENE, Ore. -- (Dec. 22, 2009) – Michelle McKinley, a University of Oregon law professor, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship. She was awarded $25,200 to work on the book manuscript, "Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1700."

McKinley was awarded the Newberry Library Short-Term Resident Fellowship for Individual Research earlier this year. She will use both awards to support her research about the legal actions taken by female slaves to achieve freedom for themselves and their children in 17th-century Peru. The Newberry Award will allow her to travel to the Newberry Library in Chicago to do research in the Ayer Collection. With the NEH fellowship, she will travel to Peru and research archives in Lima.

"I have always been deeply attracted to narratives – how people create and circulate meaning in legal settings through an exchange of experience. When I do archival work, I try to situate enslaved women as legal agents who simultaneously occupied multiple identities as mistresses, wives, mothers, wet-nurses, laundresses and domestics, and explore how these experiences within the urban work environment conditioned their identities as slaves," said McKinley. "What I want to do in excavating these narratives is to show how women were able to access 'fractions of freedom,' qualifying and complicating those totalizing ways of representing the 'slave identity' and the 'slave experience.'"

McKinley's fellowship is among $20 million in grants awarded to more than 300 humanities projects in the U.S. The NEH supports learning in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities.

"Michelle’s work stands out for the stunning depth of her pioneering archival research. She has burrowed through the enormous and little-used archives of ecclesiastical court cases from colonial Peru, uncovering cases that provide extraordinarily rich evidence of the tug-of-war between slavery and freedom, the vast influence of religion, the ongoing process of racial formation, women’s struggles against patriarchal owners and husbands, and the formation of a fascinating, and so far little-understood, legal culture,” said Peggy Pascoe, UO history professor.

McKinley began teaching at the UO School of Law in 2007 and is a member of the UO's Center for the Study of Women in Society's Women of Color Project. She is the founder and former director of the Amazonian Peoples' Resource Initiative, a community based reproductive rights organization in Peru, where she was an advocate for global health and human rights. McKinley attended Harvard Law School and has a master's in social anthropology from Oxford University.

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