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). Viola's research focuses on slavery and labor in the Americas 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 between the 1840s and 1914.

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.

See "Publications" for the most important academic output.

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