Dr Beth Wilson

(she/her)

Overview

I joined Cardiff University as a Lecturer in History in September 2025, having just finished a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Reading and the Rotheremere American Institute, University of Oxford.

My research interests centre on histories of race, gender, resistance and emotions in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. More specifically, my first monograph, I Felt All This: Enslaved People’s Emotional Lives in the US South will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. This book focuses attention on enslaved people’s testimony from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to consider how enslaved people created their own gendered emotional ideologies, practices, and modes of emotional expression in the antebellum US South. I have also published related articles on gender, slavery, and emotions in American Nineteenth Century History and Slavery and Abolition, and recently co-edited a special issue of Slavery and Abolition, with Emily West, on ‘Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World.’

I have previously worked at University of Reading, University of Nottingham, and University of Liverpool, where I taught broadly on the history of race, gender, and resistance in the United States and Atlantic World. I have also worked extensively with young people, including in collaboration with university widening participation departments and an anti-poverty charity.