dr. VF (Viola) Müller

Viola Franziska Müller is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in WUR's Economic and Environmental History group. She received her PhD in History 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). In the broadest sense, Viola seeks to understand how slavery has impacted work. Her research on slavery and labor in the Americas focuses on political economy as well as the daily struggles of ordinary people, and integrates themes such as migration, race, urban history, environmental history, and capitalism. 

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).

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 when the institution of slavery was coming to an end in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.

Viola 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. She has recently joined the Southern Labor Studies Association as an Executive Board member.

See "Publications" for the most relevant academic output.

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