Penn & Slavery Project

VanJessica Gladney has worked with the Penn & Slavery Project since its first semester. As an undergraduate researcher, she studied the slaveholding 18th Century trustees & faculty members, and the connections between slavery and Penn’s original and current campuses. After graduating in 2018, she served as the Provost’s Public History Fellow, presenting information about the project to members of the greater Philadelphia community. Over the summer of 2019, she assisted with the design of an Augmented Reality mobile application which will feature student work.

VanJessica Gladney is a sixth-year History Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, writing a dissertation on Shays’s Rebellion. She has presented part of this research at the City University of New York’s Early American Republic Seminar.

Alongside her doctoral research, VanJessica has an interest in public history. This interest was first sparked by the Penn & Slavery Project when, after conducting research for the project, she was awarded the Provost Public Historian Fellowship. Currently, she is the Lead Tour Guide and a Digital Historian for the Penn & Slavery Project.

VanJessica also serves as the History Department Graduate Teaching Fellow for the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CETLI), the History Graduate Colloquium Co-Chair, President and Founder of the HaVeN Scholars Society, and an amateur chandler.