Vanderbilt University Assistant Professor of History Catherine Molineux is the co-winner of the 2007-08 James L. Clifford Prize for the best article on any aspect of 18th-century culture.
Molineux received the honor for Pleasures of the Smoke: “Black Virginians” in Georgian London’s Tobacco Shops, published in 2007 by the William and Mary Quarterly. The prize is awarded annually by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Molineux’s article explores the misleading imagery found in British advertisements for “New World” tobacco during the 1700s. She found numerous examples of a black prince or king being portrayed as the source for tobacco, rather than the plantation owners and thousands of African slaves who worked the fields in British colonies.
She writes, “Advertisements depicted pleasures of the smoke as at once the idea of contact with and authority over black producers of tobacco, the fantasy of extending the London smoking fraternity to include exotic black friends, and the transgressive experience of consuming a potentially demonic plant and entering into homosocial communities in London. In so doing the designers of tobacco papers drew on an established relationship of the black body to British imperialism and cultural perceptions of the racial other as a figure of deviance.”
Molineux’s primary field is British Atlantic history. She looks at popular, visual representations of black bodies produced in early modern England as a lens into popular beliefs about race, slavery and empire from 1608 to 1807.
Molineux received both her doctoral and master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins University after graduating summa cum laude from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999.
Molineux shares the prize with William A. Pettigrew of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain’s TransAtlantic Slave Trade, 1688-1717, also published by the William and Mary Quarterly.
The Clifford Fund was established in honor of the late James L. Clifford, who founded The Johnsonian News Letter in 1940. He served as third president of American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and was a prolific writer.
Media Contact: Ann Marie Deer Owens, (615) 322-NEWS
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