Dr Aisha Djelid

aisha.djelid@rai.ox.ac.uk 

I am the Broadbent Career Development Fellow in American History at the Rothermere American Institute and Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall. I completed my BA (Hons), MA, and PhD at the University of Reading. After completing my PhD I worked at Reading and at Queen Mary University of London before joining Oxford in 2024.

My doctoral thesis focused on the forced reproduction of enslaved people in the pre-Civil War US South. It explored the impact of semi-organised sexual violence as a form of proto-eugenics and pronatalism through the framework of family, gender, health, and valuation.

My current postdoctoral project also focuses on the pre-Civil War South, but explores ideas of childhood, agency, resistance, and refusal to argue that enslaved children resisted and refused their enslavement in day-to-day ways.

Bluesky:@aishadjelid.bsky.social