About the Project

This website highlights the findings and arguments explored in Chloe Zehr’s M.A. thesis, “Phrasing Insurrection: A Computational Study of the Grammars of Collective Enslaved Resistance in the South Carolina Gazette and Virginia Gazette between 1732 and 1775,” completed in Fall, 2024, at the University of Colorado Boulder. This study investigated how digital methods, such as text mining and computational corpus linguistics, can inform novel research questions and approaches to what we can know about white colonial conceptions of collective enslaved resistance in the eighteenth century. Moreover, this research calls into question how the grammars of colonial response were mutually constituted alongside the rise of hereditary racial slavery in colonial North America.

Author

Chloe A. Zehr (she/they)

  • M.A., History, University of Colorado Boulder, 2024
  • Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities, University of Colorado Boulder, 2024
  • B.A., History, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2021

Chloe started her MA in the Fall of 2022. Their research focused on eighteenth and nineteenth-century enslaved resistance and the reconstruction of those histories in the twentieth century. Pairing traditional archival methodologies with digital methods such as computer programming, digital storytelling, and mapping Chloe’s work attempts to address deeper contextualizations of enslaved resistance, especially as early Black intellectuals retold those histories in the early twentieth century. Chloe earned their B.A. in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where they primarily studied how enslaved resistance informed gendered constructs of Black femininity in the Caribbean.

Contact:

Email: Chloe.Zehr@colorado.edu & chloeazehr@gmail.com LinkedIn GitHub

Other Projects

Acknowledgements

I am beyond grateful for and indebted to the expertise, unwavering support, and feedback from the following scholars and interdisciplinary labs at the University of Colorado Boulder who helped me develop and revise this project:

  • Dr. Honor Sachs (project advisor) at the University of Colorado Boulder
  • Dr. Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders (History) at the University of Colorado Boulder
  • Dr. Henry Lovejoy (History) at the University of Colorado Boulder
  • Dr. David Glimp (English) at the University of Colorado Boulder
  • Dr. Susan Brown (Linguistics) at the University of Colorado Boulder
  • The Digital Slavery Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder
  • The Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship at the University of Colorado Boulder
  • The faculty and advisors for the Digital Humanities Certificate program at the University of Colorado Boulder