Dr. Elise A. Mitchell is a historian of the Black Atlantic with a focus on the Atlantic slave trade, Caribbean slavery, and healing. Her teaching and research interests include the history of the body, histories of gender and sexuality, the history of medicine and healing, and the longue durée history of Black life in and around the Atlantic basin. Her book project, Morbid Geographies: Enslavement, Epidemics, and Embodiment in the Early Modern Atlantic World is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Morbid Geographies considers how enslaved Africans contended with smallpox outbreaks in the context of the Atlantic slave trade to the Caribbean between roughly 1500 and 1800. Dr. Mitchell is also working on a companion digital history project, “Smallpox and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World: A Digital History.”

Professor Mitchell earned her Ph.D. in History from New York University. She has previously taught courses at New York University and Princeton University. At Swarthmore she teaches surveys in Black Atlantic history and a variety of thematic courses concerning the histories of healing and Black life, the history of the Black body, and slavery and the digital humanities.

Professor Mitchell’s writing has appeared in many academic and public forums. Her article “Morbid Crossings: Surviving Smallpox, Maritime Quarantine, and the Gendered Geography of the Early Eighteenth-Century Intra-Caribbean Slave Trade” in The William and Mary Quarterly won the 2023 WMQ New Voices Prize and the 2024 Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize for the best article in the field of Caribbean History. She is also a co-founder, board member, and co-editor of the non-profit and online magazine, Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies.

Website: eliseamitchell.com