History scholar Kelly Kennington has been selected to be the Law and Society Post-Doctoral Fellow for 2009-10 at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s Institute for Legal Studies.

Kennington, who will complete her Ph.D. in history at Duke University in Spring 2009, holds an M.A. in history from Duke (2004) and a B.A. from Tulane University (2002). Her dissertation is titled, "River of Injustice: St. Louis’s Freedom Suits and the Changing Nature of Legal Slavery in Antebellum America.”

Kennington has received numerous awards for her work, including the Anne Firor Scott Research Award, the Price Research Fellowship, and the Bass Fellowship at Duke, and has presented several papers, including "'In Contempt and Defiance of the Ordinance': The Nature of Freedom in a Border Community," at the American Society for Legal History. She was a co-organizer of the First Annual North Carolina History Thesis Writers Conference in 2006 and the Duke-UNC Southern Studies Seminar, 2005-06.

Kennington’s next project will examine the complex relationships between slavery and freedom across the Border States. After completion of the year-long post-doctoral fellowship, she will join the faculty of Auburn University as an assistant professor of history.
  

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