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April 4-6, 2025

Word of South

Katherine Mooney

Katherine Mooney is the James P. Jones Associate Professor of History at Florida State University, where she focuses on the cultural history of inequality in the United States–how it is imagined and made into political and legal discourse, how it plays out in people’s daily lives. She primarily works on the history of slavery and its legacies. Her book, Race Horse Men, examines the generations of black men who worked with Thoroughbred horses from the colonial period to the 1920s. She is presently at work on two new projects, a biography of one of the first African-American sports heroes, Isaac Murphy, and a project about ideas of gender and how they map onto animals in the United States. She’ll be appearing at Word of South as part of our tribute to the work of the late historian Ed Gray.