Historian
Viola Franziska Müller
Historian of slavery, labor, and migration in the Americas.
About
Viola Franziska Müller is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Economic and Environmental History group at Wageningen University, Netherlands. In the broadest sense, she seeks to understand how slavery has impacted work. Her research on slavery, labor, and migration in the Americas focuses on political economy as well as the daily struggles of ordinary people, and integrates legal, political, social, and environmental history.
Viola’s first book, Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, was published in 2022 with University of North Carolina Press. It won the 2023 Willie Lee Rose Prize for the best book in southern history, presented by the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH).
In the past years, Viola was a visiting researcher at Georgetown University (2024), a postdoc at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn (2021–2023), a lecturer at Utrecht University (2020–2021), a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2019–2020), and a visiting fellow at Brown University (2019). She received her PhD in History in 2020 from Leiden University.
Viola currently serves as Book Review Editor at the Journal of Global Slavery, in the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History, as Executive Board member at the Southern Labor Studies Association, and as Advisory Board member at The New American Antiquarian.
Selected Publications
Forthcoming
Special Issue
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(with Paulo Cruz Terra) Special issue “Illegal Workers and Illegal Work in the Nineteenth-Century Americas.”The special issue proposal has been accepted at Continuity & Change and will be submitted by November 2026.
Book Chapter
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2027 “Cleaning up the Ports: Warehouses, the Built Environment, and the Future of Work after Slavery in Havana Bay, 1840s–1860s,” in Slavery and the Environment in the Atlantic World, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg & Justin Roberts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2027).
Interview
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2026 (with Damian Pargas, Juliane Schiel, Ismael Montana & Michael Dickinson) with Roquinaldo Ferreira, “Winner of the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize,” Journal of Global Slavery 11:2–3 (forthcoming 2026).The Paul E. Lovejoy Prize is awarded annually for outstanding scholarly work on global slavery. The jury, of which Viola is a longtime member, conducts interviews with the winners about their books.
Latest Publications
Monograph
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2022 Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Winner of the 2023 Willie Lee Rose Prize.
Edited Volumes & Special Issues
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2024 (with Anamarija Batista & Corinna Peres) Coercion and Wage Labour: Exploring Work Relations through History and Art (London: UCL Press, 2024).
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2023 (with Claudia Bernardi, Biljana Stojić & Vilhelm Vilhelmson) Moving Workers: Historical Perspectives on Labour, Coercion, and Im/mobilities (Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2023).
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2022 (with Christian De Vito) Double special issue “Punishing the Enslaved: Slavery, Labor, and Punitive Practices in the Americas, 1760s–1880s,” Journal of Global Slavery 7:1–2 (2022).
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2019 Special section “Labor Coercion, Labor Control, and Workers’ Agency,” Labor History 60:6 (2019).
Articles
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2022 “‘Employed at the Works of the City’: The Punishment of Runaway Slaves in the Antebellum US South,” Journal of Global Slavery 7:1–2 (2022): 153–176.
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2022 (with Christian De Vito) “Introduction: Punishing the Enslaved in the Americas, 1760s–1880s,” Journal of Global Slavery 7:1–2 (2022): 1–18.
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2020 “Early Undocumented Workers: Runaway Slaves and African Americans in the Urban South, c. 1830–1860,” Labor History 61:2 (2020): 90–106.
Book Chapters
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2023 “Vluchten uit de Nederlandse slavernij,” in De vluchtelingenrepubliek: Een migratiegeschiedenis van Nederland, ed. David de Boer & Geert Janssen (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2023), 80–94.
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2018 “Illegal but Tolerated: Slave Refugees in Richmond, Virginia, 1800–1860,” in Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America, 1775–1860, ed. Damian Alan Pargas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018; paperback 2020), 137–167.
Bibliography Entry
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2020 “Internal Slave Migrations in the Americas,” Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, ed. Trevor Burnard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Selected Interviews
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2025 With Ismael Montana, Damian Pargas & Juliane Schiel, “Slavery and Global History: Reflections on the 10th Anniversary of the Journal of Global Slavery: An Interview with the Past, Current, and Incoming Editors,” Journal of Global Slavery 10:1 (2025): 1–14.
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2024 H-SAWH Interview with 2023 SAWH Prize Winners, “Dr. Viola Müller, Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize,” H-Net (February 10, 2024).
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2023 “Author Interview,” H-CivWar, H-Net (February 1, 2023).
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2022 (with Christian De Vito) with Sidney Chalhoub, “The Making of History: Historiography, Institutionalization, and the Trajectory of Punishment in Brazilian Slavery Studies,” Journal of Global Slavery 7:1–2 (2022): 225–241.
Full list on Research@WUR and Google Scholar.
Current Research
Viola’s present work can be divided along three main lines.
From Slavery to Illegality? A Comparative Study of Labor Coercion and Capitalism in the Americas, 1840–1914
In 2023, she was awarded an NWO Veni grant for this project. It explores the illegalization of urban workers as a key mechanism of coercion when the institution of slavery was coming to an end in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.
Domination through Starvation: Hunger Politics and State of War on American Slave Plantations, 1776–1861
A smaller project brings together the history of slavery and interdisciplinary famine and war studies. In 2026, Viola received an NWO Open Competitie XS grant for this project.
Graphic Novel
Integrating history and art, Viola is currently preparing a graphic novel that brings the urban built environment of nineteenth-century slavery and labor into the awareness of a broader public. She has co-edited a volume on how intermedial dialogue can critically engage with the past, published as Coercion and Wage Labour: Exploring Work Relations through History and Art (UCL Press, 2024).
Get in Contact
- viola.muller (at) wur.nl
- Office
- Leeuwenborch
Hollandseweg 1
6706 KN Wageningen, Netherlands