Sophie White knows what it’s like to be considered an outsider.
The University of Notre Dame professor of American studies was born in Mauritius, a former French colonial island in the Indian Ocean, and grew up in a culture where the legacies of slavery, discrimination, racism, and religious plurality were ever present. This multicultural environment also allowed her to be linguistically diverse in English, French, and Creole — skills that would later be valuable in her professional life.
“It was a melting pot,” she said. “And that shaped me significantly.”
White’s parents were not from Mauritius and growing up, she was the only redhead she knew. That sense of being an outsider — coupled with a background she defines as privileged — instilled a distinctive perspective through which she could confront issues of race, gender, difference, and belonging.
Throughout her academic career, White has aimed to illuminate the lives and experiences of those often relegated to the margins — the enslaved, the “othered,” and the historically overlooked. Her work is rooted in archival research and utilizes diverse methodologies that underscore the complexity of the topics while also revealing singular stories within them.
“I want people to know that these sources exist,” she said. “We need to grapple with them and to hear those perspectives.”
In recognition of her work, White is the recipient of the 2025 College of Arts & Letters Research Award. The honor recognizes faculty who demonstrate significant scholarly achievement and impact, as well as leadership, innovation, and engagement with the University’s research and educational mission.
The award will be presented to White at the college’s spring faculty meeting at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 6, in 215/216 McKenna Hall. Laura Knoppers, the George N. Shuster Professor of English Literature, will receive the Graduate Student Mentorship Award at the same event.
“As the liberal arts — and, really, the greater culture — reconsider questions of race, indigeneity, and power,” wrote Jason Ruiz, a professor of American studies and chair of the department, in nominating her for the award, “White’s work provides a touchstone for rethinking who has the ability to represent him- or herself as part of the historical record, and thus a part of American society.”
Pushing boundaries
Initially trained as an art historian, White’s academic path gradually led her to American studies, which is intrinsically interdisciplinary. The field’s flexibility allowed her to utilize different methodologies, from archival research and material culture analysis to visual culture studies, literary analysis, and legal and religious history, innovations that have led to her being awarded three National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships.
“Exploring these different methodologies and different approaches to the past has been very freeing,” she said.
A concurrent professor in Africana studies, gender studies, and history, White’s research has largely focused on race and slavery in French colonies in the Americas, the Caribbean, and islands in the Indian Ocean.
In her first book, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana, White examined material culture and religion to dissect the construction of race in 18th-century Louisiana.
She continued her focus on the topic of race with her second book, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana, in which she conducted groundbreaking research by analyzing courtroom testimony from 18th-century enslaved Africans that offered an exceptional glimpse into their lives, through their own words.
“As you read these sources, they’re very moving, they are full of character, and above all, you will find that the individuals who testified kept insisting on their humanity,” said White, a fellow with the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights. “It has become a crusade for me to help propel research on such evidence, and to keep pushing the boundaries of what counts as an autobiographical slave narrative.”
Voices of the Enslaved won seven book awards, including the 2020 American Historical Association’s Rawley Prize in Atlantic history and the 2020 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on slavery.
White, also an affiliate with the Initiative on Race and Resilience, has extended this research with an edited volume on slave testimony in French and British societies. She has also sought to make it even more public-facing through a digital humanities project foregrounding four court cases containing testimony ranging from an elderly enslaved man to an enslaved 11-year-old girl. She is also a founding member of a major digital humanities project, “Keywords for Black Louisiana,” funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
“I think the success of the book is really a sign of how hungry we are to uncover new sources or to rethink how we interpret sources that we already know about,” she said. “And push those boundaries.”
‘A moral obligation’
For the last five years, White has also concentrated her research on another type of “othering” — against redheads.
“Clearly I’m drawn to thinking about the damage that some humans can do to others on the basis of color,” she said. “I’m just pivoting from skin color to hair color, one starting point addressing the Irish saying that ‘gingers have no soul.’”
Spanning from ancient Egypt to the 21st century, the project encompasses a book tentatively titled “Strangers Within: A Global and Genomic History of Red Hair,” as well as plans for an exhibition and a documentary. The research, funded by a NEH Public Scholars grant, will explore the cultural significance of red hair and reveal surprising connections to antisemitism and other forms of discrimination. White, also a fellow with Nanovic Institute for European Studies, said she has once again used many methods in her research for this project, including medical humanities and a field of DNA analysis called genomics.
Her research also lends itself to the classroom, where she challenges undergraduates to engage with primary sources and bear the moral weight of the past. In one project, White has students research the life of an enslaved person mentioned in early American newspaper advertisements.
“White’s work provides a touchstone for rethinking who has the ability to represent him- or herself as part of the historical record, and thus a part of American society.”
-Jason Ruiz, professor of American studies and chair of department
“I remind them that there were so many millions and millions of people who were enslaved in early America, but each one of those millions was a person, an individual just like them,” White said. “The statistics are important because they’re terrifying, and they should horrify us. But when we bring it down to the individual level, I think that’s when we fully grasp the horror of slavery and racism. And it’s an effective way for students to come to terms with that.”
For White, asking long-ranging, systemic questions about discrimination isn’t just for the sake of research — it’s also an ethical duty.
“To me, it’s a moral obligation to wrestle with slavery, and I get very emotional when I think about it,” she said. “In my own work, I feel the weight of those individuals who testified, and I feel a moral obligation to listen to what they’re saying and to try to understand. I might not have the final word on what they were hoping to communicate, but I at least want to encourage us to hear their words.”
