Vanessa Holden

Advisor

Vanessa M. Holden is an associate professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is also the director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative. Dr. Holden is the author of Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community (University of Illinois Press), winner of the 2021 James H. Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Surviving Southampton was also shortlisted for the MAAH Stone Book Award. Dr. Holden’s work and writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus. Dr. Holden serves as a faculty adviser on a number of public history and digital humanities projects including Freedom on the Move (a digital archive of runaway slave ads). As Director of the CKSI she leads several projects including the Digital Access Project (DAP), a project aimed at digitizing and making accessible Fayette County, Kentucky’s extant Deed Books in partnership with a team of UK scholars, local government, the Blue Grass Community Foundation, and descendant community members. Find her on Twitter, while it lasts, @drvholden.