Join the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) for a lecture by historian Vanessa Holden, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and Director of the African American and Africana Studies Program. Holden's research examines slave insurrections and their impact on our understanding of the nation's founding, with particular attention to the experiences of women and children whose stories are often absent from traditional narratives of early American democracy.Holden is also co-creator of the Freedom on the Run public humanities project, which preserves and makes accessible historical newspaper advertisements documenting the efforts of enslaved people to self-emancipate. Drawing from her scholarship and public humanities work, Holden will explore how expanding our understanding of who was present at the founding can deepen conversations about democracy, citizenship, and belonging in the United States.
Held in conjunction with programming surrounding the nation's 250th anniversary and Constitution Day, the event invites students, faculty, staff, and community members to engage with the complex histories that continue to shape American democracy today.
Copies of Holden's work and the Summer 2026 special issue of Ms. Magazine, Feminism and the Founding, will be available while supplies last.
Vanessa M. Holden (She/Her) is currently 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 is engaged in a number of digital humanities projects. She is the co-organizer of the Queering Slavery Working Group (#QSWG) with Jessica M. Johnson (Johns Hopkins). Dr. Holden currently serves as a lead faculty member for the Freedom on the Move Project, an open-source crowdsourced database of advertisements for self-emancipated people (often called runaway ads). She is also an advisory board member for the Chronicle of African Americans in the Horse Industry, a digital humanities project focused on collecting, preserving, and making accessible histories of African American involvement in America’s many horse industries.  
Dr. Holden’s 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, The Rumpus, and Electric Marronage. She also blogs for Black Perspectives, the official blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History. Her research and teaching interests include African-American history, women's and gender history, the history of the American South, and U.S. history (pre-1865). 
Dr. Holden serves as a faculty adviser and consultant on several public history and digital humanities projects including Freedom on the Move (a digital archive of runaway slave ads); Black Horsemen of the Kentucky Turf (an exhibit chronicling the intersecting histories of African Americans and the horse industry in Kentucky), and a grant project aimed at bringing a virtual driving tour and a museum to Southampton County, VA, that interprets the Southampton Rebellion.
You can find Dr. Holden on Twitter @drvholden.