Alexis Guilbault

Alexis is a historian of colonialism, race, and slavery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America. She is from the south suburbs of Chicago, and, before joining DePaul in 2023, she served as the Director of Digital Humanities Initiative and a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research traces circuits of unfreedom in the Ohio River Valley—including Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Kentucky—showing how colonial and Indigenous powers held Black, Native, and white people in various kinds of bondage. She argues that these layered histories of captivity, labor, and violence challenge the idea of a clear divide between “free" and “slave" territories.