Sue Peabody, Ph.D., is Meyer Distinguished Professor of History and Liberal Arts at Washington State University, and author of numerous historical books and articles on slavery, race and the law in France and its colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her most recent book, Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies (Oxford, 2017), has won three historical prizes. The French translation and adaptation, Les enfants de Madeleine, by Pierre H. Boulle is forthcoming (Karthala, CIRESC, Musée historique de Villèle, 2019). She explores how narrative shapes historical memory in scholarship, fiction, digital media, and film.

More infos: history.wsu.edu/faculty/sue-peabody/

During her residency at the Camargo Foundation, Sue Peabody used the maiden voyage of a single ship, Le Succès, built in Nantes in 1820 to explore the legacies the clandestine slave trade. It was a failure because it was prosecuted twice on its first journey: first by French authorities in Île Bourbon (La Réunion), where the officers were acquitted, and then, after its second slave run to Zanzibar, by the British Admiralty in Mauritius, where the ship was confiscated for violating the slave trade ban. At Camargo, Sue began to write a work of creative nonfiction about slavery and anti-slavery in the Indian Ocean sphere.

Sue Peabody was in residence at the Camargo Foundation in 2019, as part of the Core Program.