Natalie Joy

Current Research

My current book project, The Indian's Cause: Native Americans and the American Antislavery Movement, argues that Native Americans were central in shaping the ideas and strategy of abolitionism from the late 1820s to the Civil War.

This project has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including an NEH fellowship at the New-York Historical Society, a long-term fellowship at the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, an African American Studies Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, a one-month fellowship at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, a postdoctoral fellowship at the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism at the University of Pennsylvania, an Andrew W. Mellon Short-Term Research Fellowship at the Huntington Library, a Price Visiting Research Fellowship at the Clements Library and a Philips Fund Grant for Native American Research from the American Philosophical Society.

Major Publications

• "The Indian's Cause: Abolitionists and Native American Rights," Journal of the Civil War Era special issue on "The Future of Abolition Studies," guest edited by Manisha Sinha, vol. 8, no. 2 (June 2018): 215-242.
• "From Slave Quarters to Wigwams: Native American Slaveholding and the Debate Over Civilization," in Douglas Hamilton, Kate Hodgson and Joel Quirk, eds., Slavery, Memory and Identity: National Representations and Global Legacies (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 29-44.
• "Cherokee Slaveholders and Radical Abolitionists: An Unlikely Alliance in Antebellum America," Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 10:4 (July 2010).

Teaching Interests

• Native American history
• American history
• Social movements

Courses Taught

• HIST 260 American History to 1865
• HIST 360 Early Encounters in Native North America
• HIST 370 Introduction to American Indian History
• HIST 395 Historical Methods
• HIST 464/565 Civil War Era
• History 495 Senior Thesis
• Honors 410 Indigenous Illinois (Honors seminar co-taught with Prof. Dana Bardolph, Anthropology)
• HIST 710 Global Indigenous History (graduate reading and research seminar)

Honors Faculty Fellow (2021-2022)

As an Honors Faculty Fellow, Professor Joy will teach a seminar on Indigenous Illinois in spring 2022 in the University Honors Program. The Honors Faculty Fellowship program identifies faculty eager to teach innovative, exciting seminars of interest to highly motivated students from across the university.

In 2023-25 I was the Bonn-Yale-Anton Wilhelm-Amo Fellow at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany.