The Scholar
Talitha L. LeFlouria was born in 1983. She earned her Ph.D. from Emory University and teaches at the University of Virginia, where she is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Curator of Slavery at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. She directs the National Freedom Day Project and the Slave Writings Initiative.
LeFlouria is distinctive in how she recovers the lost lives of Black women bound into Georgia’s convict labor system. Most histories of convict leasing focused on men. LeFlouria insisted the women must be named.
Restoring the Record
In Chained in Silence (2015), LeFlouria recovers the lost lives of Black women bound into Georgia’s convict labor system, laboring in brickyards and on chain gangs while their suffering was written out of the record. She used prison ledgers, medical records, court dockets, and family correspondence to reconstruct what happened to women the official history called “unmentionable.”
Her work proves that the convict-leasing system did not spare women. It exploited them in ways that were specifically gendered – chain gangs that stripped them of bodily autonomy, medical experimentation that treated them as expendable, labor quotas that assumed male strength in female bodies. And then it wrote them out of the story.
The Bridge to the Archive
LeFlouria gives the Archive its practice of recovering the erased. When the Archive insists on tracing continuity across the rupture, it must also insist on naming those the rupture tried to silence. LeFlouria demonstrates how that recovery happens: not by assuming the record is lost, but by reading against the grain to find what remains.
Her work strengthens the Law category’s treatment of convict leasing, ensuring that women’s experience is not an afterthought. But her influence extends further. When the Family category addresses kinship disruption, when the Resistance category documents Wells’s investigative journalism, when Penningroth recovers informal property networks – LeFlouria provides the model for finding evidence where official sources claim none exists.
She is also a contemporary scholar actively engaged in public history work. Her curatorial projects and initiatives extend the Archive’s mission beyond digital publication into physical space and community programming. That parallel work strengthens the Archive’s claim that knowledge returned to the hands of the people does not end at the screen.