Kayla Cotter is a senior at Penn studying English and History with a concentration in American history. She joined the Penn & Slavery Project in Spring 2024 after taking Professor Kathleen Brown’s course Witches, Rebels, and Prophets: People on the Margins in Early America the previous semester. She researched Penn Medical alum, James Norcom, who is the real life Dr. Flint depicted in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. She is continuing her research on Norcom and his family in the Fall 2024 semester. Outside of the Penn & Slavery Project, she is a Research Assistant for the Printing in Prisons Project and serves as the ScholarlyCommons and Digital Projects Assistant with the Research Data & Digital Scholarship team at Penn Libraries. She is also a member of the History Department’s Undergraduate Advisory Board. In Summer 2024, she was a Northern Hemisphere Research Scholar at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
In addition to her report on James Norcom, Kayla also created https://incidents.blog/ in 2024 to further contextualize Harriet Jacobs’ experience.
Penn & Slavery Project 