Rate My Professor Sharla Fett

Sharla M. Fett is the Robert Glass Cleland Professor in American History at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she has been a faculty member since 2002. She holds a B.A. from Carleton College, an M.A. from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Fett serves as Professor in the History Department, Chair of American Studies, and faculty affiliate in Black Studies. She teaches courses on early U.S. and African American history, including the Atlantic World, Slavery and the Antebellum South, U.S. Women’s History, Collective Memory and Slavery’s Legacies, U.S. Cultures and Society, Women and Community Health, Race, Rights, Revolution in the Atlantic World, and seminars on Interpreting Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction as well as the History Comprehensive Thesis.

Fett's research specializes in nineteenth-century Atlantic World slavery, the antebellum U.S. South, and the intersections of race, gender, and health. Her acclaimed books include Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), which explores African American healing practices amid enslavement, and Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), detailing the ordeals of Africans intercepted by U.S. forces during the slave trade's suppression, including detention, forced migration, and labor under colonial policies. She has published further in Slavery and Abolition (2009), essays in New Studies in the History of American Slavery edited by Stephanie Camp and Edward Baptist (2006), and Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade edited by Ana Lucia Araujo (2010). Fett collaborates as a teaching partner with the Colored Conventions Project, editing the student-researched exhibit "Equality Before the Law: California Black Convention Activism, 1855-1865," and contributes to a Digital Humanities project on the diaspora of Liberated Africans. Her scholarship connects historical practices to contemporary issues in Black women’s health and refugee policy. In recognition of her achievements, she was appointed Robert Glass Cleland Professor in 2021 and received the Graham L. Sterling Memorial Award for teaching, scholarship, and service in 2017. She delivered the 2020 Stephanie M.H. Camp Memorial Lecture and presented at international conferences on postcoloniality and forced migration.