Angela Sutton

Research Assistant Professor of Communication of Science and Technology
Assistant Dean for Graduate Education and Academic Affairs

Angela Sutton is a social and digital historian of the Atlantic World interested in the tools and methods that preserve and widen access to the sources that help refine and redefine popular understandings of American slavery and its modern consequences. She is the director of the Builders and Defenders Database, which makes available the names and biographical information of the enslaved and free Black people who built and defended the Civil War defenses of Nashville (including the UNESCO Site of Memory, Fort Negley) as well as the Fort Negley Descendants Project, an oral history archive of their descendants. She is the author of Pirates of the Slave Trade: the Battle of Cape Lopez and the Birth of an American Institution (2023). Her other work on the intersections between slavery, memory, modern space, and the digital has appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, The Historical Journal, The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, archipelagos, and Slavery & Abolition. Her most recent project involves a collaboration with archaeologists from Middle Tennessee State University on descendant-led excavation, and is being funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.