About

Justene Hill Edwards is an Associate Professor of History in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. Her research explores the intersection of African American history, the history of slavery, and the history of American capitalism. In her work, she investigates slavery’s role in the long history of economic inequality in America, focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries. Always highlighting the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, she studies the relationship between economic and political freedom for people of African descent in the United States. She is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina, published in 2021 by Columbia University Press.  

Her forthcoming book, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank, to be published in October 2024 by W.W. Norton, investigates the fraught history of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. 

She received research support for this project from the Carnegie Corporation of New York as a 2022 Carnegie Fellow, the Mellon Foundation as a Mellon New Directions Fellow, and the Karsh Institution for Democracy at the University of Virginia.  

Justene was a Consortium Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a Quin Morton Teaching Fellow in Princeton University’s Writing Center.  Her dissertation, “’Felonious Transactions: The Legal Culture and Business Practices of Slave Economies in South Carolina, 1787-1860,” was a finalist for the C. Vann Woodward Prize from the South Historical Association, a finalist for the SHEAR Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians on the Early American Republic, and a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Dissertation Prize from the Business History Conference. Justene’s scholarship has been supported by the Program in American Studies at Princeton University, the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, the Program in International and Regional Studies at Princeton University, and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.  

Justene currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia and the Board of Trustees of the Business History Conference. She was a Trustee of the Midland School.  She is also on the editorial boards of Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, and the University of Virginia Press.

She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College, M.A. from Florida International University, and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

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