A brown‑bag lunchtime talk with Jean Pfaelzer on 250 years of enslavement, coerced labour and hidden histories in the U.S. West.
Event details
Speaker: Professor Jean Pfaelzer (University of Delaware; Murray Edwards College, Cambridge)
12 May | 12.30 pm to 1.30 pm (brown‑bag lunchtime talk — bring your own lunch)
Bridgetower Room, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, CB2 1TJ
Free and open to all, but booking is essential. Register via Eventbrite.
Event description
Join us for a brown‑bag lunchtime conversation with Professor Jean Pfaelzer, an established scholar of labour, immigration, and social history. Drawing on her recent and forthcoming work, she will share insights from her current research and reflect on some of the broader questions it raises.
This session is part of her Easter Term residency as a Senior Research Fellow at Murray Edwards College, and provides an opportunity for colleagues working in slavery studies, human rights, memory, and migration to connect with her work.
Speaker biography
Jean Pfaelzer is the author of California, A Slave State (Yale UP, 2023, 2025) Heyday History of the Year; Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (Random House) New York Times 100 Best Books of the Year, and four other books. Three operas (one in production), are based on Driven Out which has been optioned for a 4-part t.v. series.
Jean was on curatorial teams for I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story (Smithsonian Museum of American History.) She was featured in Ric Burns PBS American Experience “1882: Chinese Exclusion Act” & CSPAN’s “African American Slavery and the Underground Railroad in California” and other T.V. specials. She speaks on PBS, NPR and Pacifica on labor and immigration.
Currently Professor Emerita at the University of Delaware, Pfaelzer was Executive Director of the National Labor Law Center, and Senior Legislative Analyst in the US House of Representatives, focusing on immigration, labor, and women. She was Senior Fulbright Scholar at U. Utrecht, and 2024, and returning Easter Term 2026 as a Senior Research Fellow at Cambridge University. Books forthcoming include: "I Seen it Myself" California Slave Narratives: 1769-Present. and Muted Mutinies: Slave Revolts on Chinese “Coolie” Ships. In 2025 Jean was also a Sr. Fellow at the Institute for Slavery and Dependency Studies, U. Bonn.
She has been on the team of the Eureka Chinatown Monument commemorating Chinese immigrants who were purged from the city in 1885, and consulting on the vast Los Angeles monument to the Chinese who were the victims of the largest mass lynching of 1860.
Registration
This event is free and open to all, but booking is essential.
Please register via Eventbrite.