dr. VF (Viola) Müller

Viola Franziska Müller is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in WUR's Economic and Environmental History group. In the broadest sense, she seeks to understand how slavery has impacted work. Her research on slavery, labor, and migration in the Americas focuses on political economy as well as the daily struggles of ordinary people, and integrates legal, political, social, and environmental history.

Viola's present work can be divided along three main lines: In 2023, she was awarded 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 when the institution of slavery was coming to an end in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.

Integrating history and art, Viola is currently preparing a graphic novel that brings the urban built environment of nineteenth-century slavery and labor into the awareness of a broader public. She has co-edited a volume on how intermedial dialogue can critically engage with the past, published as Coercion and Wage Labour: Exploring Work Relations through History and Art (UCL Press, 2024). 

A smaller project brings together the history of slavery and interdisciplinary famine and war studies. In 2026, Viola received an NWO Open Competitie XS grant for "Domination through Starvation: Hunger Politics and State of War on American Slave Plantations, 1776-1861."

Viola's first book Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South was published in 2022 with University of North Carolina Press. It won the 2023 Willie Lee Rose Prize for the best book in southern history presented by the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH). See "Research output" for a selection of her most recent academic publications.

In the past years, Viola was a visiting researcher at Georgetown University (2024), a postdoc at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies 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). She received her PhD in History in 2020 from Leiden University. 

At WUR, Viola teaches in the courses Politics of Development: State, Property and Resistance (SDC 35806); Colonialism and Slavery in World History (RHI 32806); and Global Migration (RHI 32306). 

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