Shannon Eaves

Assistant Professor

Address: Maybank Hall 326
Office Hours: TR 12:15-1:30 & by appt.
Phone: 843.953.1420
E-mail: eavessc@cofc.edu


Shannon C. Eaves earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of African American History here at the College of Charleston. She is a specialist in 19thcentury U.S. History, African American History, and Slavery and Gender in the Antebellum South. She most recently served as the 2017-2018 Race and Gender Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University. Her current book project Illicit Intercourse: How the Sexual Exploitation of Enslaved Women Shaped the Antebellum Southinserts enslaved women, rape, and sexual exploitation into the center of scholarly debates on the Slave South’s system of power and culture. This study illustrates the processes by which rape and sexualized violence and the trauma that ensued resulted in a Rape Culture that became woven into the very fabric of the plantation complex, influencing daily life for the enslaved and slaveholders alike.  

Education

Ph.D. in U.S. History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015

M.A. in U.S. History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010

M.A. in Teaching, University of South Carolina, 2005 

B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003

Courses Taught

Comparative Slavery in the Americas 

African American History to 1865

African American History since 1865

Civil War and Reconstruction 

United States History to 1865

United States History since 1865

History of the New South: 1865-present

Honors and Awards

Dr. Eaves has been awarded fellowships from the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis, Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University, Library Company of Philadelphia, Department of History at North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School, as well as numerous research grants. 

Publications

Illicit Intercourse: How the Sexual Exploitation of Enslaved Women Shaped the Antebellum South (In progress)

“‘The Greater Part of Slaveholders Are Licentious Men’: Articulating of a Sexual Exploitation Consciousness in the Antebellum South,” Expanding the Boundaries of Black Intellectual History(Northwestern University Press, forthcoming)