Jenna Gibbs

Bio

Jenna M. Gibbs’s research focuses on the intersections among culture, pol­itics, religion and imperial expansion in the long eighteenth century. She is the author of Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760s–1850s (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), which examines the Anglophone transatlantic debates about slavery, abolition, and emancipation in theatre and related media, and has written articles and book chapters on questions of race and performance. Her forthcoming second mono­graph, The Global Latrobe Family: Evangelicalism, Slavery and Empire 1750s–1850s, under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press, traces the imperial and missionizing activities of three generations of one Moravian family, the Latrobes, in the West Indies, mainland North America, South Africa, and Australia. The book uses the Latrobe family as a lens into larger questions of the complex relationship between evangelicalism and imperialism, and how evangelicals dealt with enslaved and indigenous peoples. She is also at the early stages of a monograph on the African Grove Theater, an African American theatre company in 1820s New York. She is co-editor, with Keith Baker of Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2015), editor of Global Protestant Networks: Missions, Politics and Print 1750s-1850 (Routledge, 2019), and co-editor, with Sarah J. Adams and Wendy L .Sutherland, of Staging Slavery Around 1800: Performances of Colonial Slavery and Race from an International Perspective (Routledge, 2023). She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Stanford Humanities Center, and the German Historical Institute. She teaches American history courses on colonial America, the American Revolution and the early republic, and Atlantic and global history courses on religion, slavery and anti-slavery, and imperial-indigenous relations.