Specializing in North American slavery, he is the author of The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South (2010) as well as numerous academic articles for journals such as Slavery and Abolition, the Journal of Family History, the Journal of Early American History, and American Nineteenth Century History. In 2011, he was granted a prestigious three-year Veni postdoctoral fellowship from the Dutch Council for Scientific Research (NWO) and a visiting research fellowship from the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universit t of Berlin. Pargas is also an editor for the journal Itinerario: Journal of European Expansion and Globalisation and the secretary of the Netherlands Association for American Studies.