Alison McCann

Background

About Alison McCann

My current research interest looks at the Black American Colonization Movement to Liberia in the 19th century. I find it fascinating that previously enslaved African Americans were given the duty to take American empire abroad. They, in many ways became pioneers, frontier people, and colonizers in Liberia. Traditional historiography usually leans on the institutional side of this story, the American Colonization Society and other smaller benevolent and local manumission societies. But my work seeks the intimate spaces of empire—essentially, how did these people make their communities and place in Africa. I seek out the settlers themselves and what they learned at home and took abroad. I refuse the simple notion of settler colonialism and seek to examine their multidimensional lives—where they lived at the edge of empire. Greatly appreciated supporters of my scholarship The Center for Global Black Studies, UGrow Fellow, 2024-2025 The Virginia Museum and Historical Society, Summer fellow, 2024 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Fellowship, DEI Research Fellowship, Summer 2022 Dean’s Fellow at The University of Miami, Summer 2022 History Department Research Grant, Summer 2020 Al and Janie Nahmad Prize, Department of History, University of Miami, AY 2020-21 Saul Santana Award for Excellent Graduate Studies in History, 2017