Nik Ribianszky

Nik Ribianszky is an assistant professor in history at Queen’s University Belfast. Her area of specialization is in 18th and 19th century U.S. and African American history, women and gender history, and race relations with particular focus on the experiences of enslaved and free people of color in the South. Her book Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865 (UGA Press, March 2021) tells the stories of free Black people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom in a slave society. There is also a companion website to her book which gives additional resources about free Black people.

Ribianszky also works with Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, a project housed at Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University, in partnership with the MSU Department of History and scholars at multiple institutions and is a partner in their National Endowment for the Humanities grant, “Expanding Enslaved Hub: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade.” Her database on free people of color in Natchez, Mississippi will be linked on Enslaved's platform and make her research available to other scholars of enslaved and free people of color and link this project with data from different geographical regions, an endeavor that gives scholars, the public, and the descendant community access to relevant demographic information. Her next project centers on people of African descent in Ireland from 1600 to 1900.