Role
Dr Lussana is a lecturer in American history. He teaches on a variety of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level including:
- HIST 103: Pathways through Modernity
- HIST 207: Land of Liberty: History of the United States, 1815-2000
- HIST 309: The African American Experience in History and Memory
- HIST 402: Making History
Career overview
Dr Lussana lectured at the University of Warwick and Royal Holloway University of London before joining NTU.
Research areas
Dr Lussana is a lecturer in American history. His research focuses on issues of race, gender, and emotion in 19th-century America, and in particular on the history of African American slavery. His first monograph, My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity and Resistance (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), explores the homosocial world of enslaved men in the antebellum southern United States. It examines how pursuits such as drinking, gambling, wrestling, and hunting brought enslaved men together in an all-male subculture through which they constructed their own independent notions of masculinity, friendship, and resistance. His second research project explores the relationship between constructions of race and gender in the early modern and modern period.
Opportunities to carry out postgraduate research towards an MPhil / PhD exist and further information may be obtained from the NTU Graduate School.
Publications
‘Reassessing Brer Rabbit: Friendship, Altruism and Community in the Folklore of Enslaved African Americans’, Slavery and Abolition, 39:1 (March, 2018), pp. 123-146.
My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016).
‘Slave Boxers on the Antebellum Plantation’, Major Problems in American Sport History, 2nd ed., edited by Steven A. Riess (Cengage, 2015), pp. 76-85.
‘“No Band of Brothers Could Be More Loving”: Enslaved Male Homosociality, Friendship, and Resistance in the Antebellum American South’, Journal of Social History, 46:4 (Summer, 2013), pp. 872-895.
‘Slave Fighting in the Old South’, Alabama Heritage, 107 (Winter 2013), pp. 16-23.
‘To See Who Was Best on the Plantation: Enslaved Fighting Contests and Masculinity in the Antebellum Plantation South’, Journal of Southern History, 76:4 (November, 2010), pp. 901-922.
‘Masculinity as a Category of Analysis in Southern History’, in Lydia Plath and Sergio Lussana (eds.), Black and White Masculinity in the American South, 1800-2000 (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 1-14.