Alexis Broderick specializes in African American and 19th century U.S. history. She received her doctorate in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. Her current book project, American Incest: Kinship, Sex, and Commerce in Slavery and Reconstruction, is about the tangled connections between slavery, sexual violence, and incest in the nineteenth-century United States. She teaches courses on African American history and on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. In Spring 2021, Dr. Broderick will be teaching a research seminar on the history of Indigenous and Black peoples in New Hampshire. The class will explore the connections between the University of New Hampshire, slavery, and Native dispossession. Dr. Broderick will work with students in the class to design an augmented reality smartphone app which will illuminate these aspects of UNH’s history.
Prior to joining UNH’s history department, Dr. Broderick served as the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow for the Penn & Slavery Project at the University of Pennsylvania. In that role, she helped lead a team that designed a smartphone app which uses augmented reality technology to explore the University of Pennsylvania’s historical ties to slavery and race science, and the contributions of enslaved people to the institution. Dr. Broderick has contributed to several scholarly publications, including a forthcoming chapter in Expanding the Boundaries of African American Intellectual History (Northwestern University Press).