Experiments in Storytelling: Communal Biography in the Colonial Americas

Sara Johnson is a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the Co-Director of the UCSD Black Studies Project. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and her B.A. from Yale University in Comparative Literature and African American Studies. Past fellowships include those from the Ford Foundation, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Program, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Hellman Fund, the UC Consortium for Black Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Bibliographical Society of America.

Johnson’s book The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) is an inter-disciplinary study that explores how people responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1845). The book traces expressions of transcolonial black politics, both aesthetic and experiential, in places including Hispaniola, Louisiana, Jamaica, and Cuba. 

Her newest book, Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2023) documents the work of Moreau de Saint-Méry, a late eighteenth-century Caribbean intellectual. The book combines traditional academic chapters and experimental forms in its use of archival fragments and visual culture to tell the stories of the free people of color and enslaved women and men who enabled Moreau’s work. Encyclopédie noire has been awarded the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the J. Russell Major Prize from the American Historical Association, the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association and the Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society.