dr. VF (Viola) Müller

Viola Franziska Müller is a historian of slavery and labor in the Americas. She received her PhD in 2020 from Leiden University. She holds an MA in Migration History (Leiden University, cum laude, 2015) and a BA in Latin American Studies (University of Cologne, 2012). Viola is currently a visiting researcher at Georgetown University. 

Before coming to Wageningen in 2024, Viola was a postdoc at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at University of Bonn (2021-2023), a lecturer at Utrecht University (2020-2021), a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2019-2020), and a visiting fellow at Brown University (2019).

Her first book Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) won the 2023 Willie Lee Rose Prize for the best book in southern history presented by the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH). In 2023, Viola received an NWO Veni grant for her project “From Slavery to Illegality? A Comparative Study of Labor Coercion and Capitalism in the Americas, 1840-1914.” It explores the illegalization of urban workers as a key mechanism of coercion between the 1840s and 1914.

Viola is co-convenor of the working group "Labour and Coercion" of the European Labour History Network (ELHN), until recently also known as COST Action “Worlds of Related Coercions in Work” (WORCK) (2019-2024). She serves as Book Review Editor at the Journal of Global Slavery and on the editorial advisory boards of The New American Antiquarian and the Virginia Magazine of History & Biography.

See "Publications" for Viola's most important academic output.

E-mail: viola.muller[at]wur.nl