Jeff Forret
Ph.D., University of Delaware, 2003
M.A., University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 1998
B.A., St. Ambrose University, 1995
Archer 200N
(409) 880-2289
forretjp@lamar.edu
Jeff Forret was named University Professor in 2023 and, for the 2022-2024 term, the Dr. Ralph and Edna Wooster Professor of History. He has also been an LU Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow, 2016-2021; the Distinguished Faculty Lecturer for 2020; and the University Scholar Award winner for 2016.
His latest monograph, Williams' Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a legal history of the coastwise domestic slave trade. Funded by a William Nelson Cromwell Fellowship and an NEH Summer Stipend, it won the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) 2021 Leadership in History Award in the large press category. A previous book, Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (LSU Press, 2015) won the 18th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. It also earned an honorable mention in the U.S. history category at the 2016 Professional & Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Awards and was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Book Prize given by the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery.
Dr. Forret also published Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (LSU Press, 2006); Slavery in the United States (Facts on File, 2012), a volume in the Issues and Controversies in American History series; as well as numerous articles that have appeared in Time, Smithsonian Magazine, the Journal of Southern History, Slavery & Abolition, the Journal of the Early Republic, and other journals, anthologies, encyclopedias, and textbooks.
He also co-edited, with Bruce E. Baker, the anthology Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century (LSU Press, 2021) and, with Christine E. Sears, New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison (LSU Press, 2015).
His next monograph, The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War (The New Press, November 2024) chronicles four cargoes of enslaved Americans emancipated by British colonial authorities and slave owners' subsequent quest for compensation from Great Britain.
His current research explores the connections between the Indigenous history of the Upper Mississippi River and the Dred Scott case. It has been funded by a State Historical Society of Iowa Research Grant. A specialist in the study of slavery, the South, and nineteenth-century history, Dr. Forret serves as graduate director for the department.