Sara Johnson is professor of literature of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego. Her book, Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2023), documents the work of Moreau de Saint-Méry, a late eighteenth-century Caribbean intellectual. The...
In this workshop, the Legal Humanities RFG will discuss Giuliana Perrone's new paper, "Rehearsals for Reparations." This pre-circulated paper considers a set of lawsuits in which emancipated people sued to have their enslavers’ bequests to them honored. It contends that we should see these suits...
Professor John Majewski will speak about the 1937 WPA interview of Robert Glenn, who recounted how he was sold as a child as part of the slave trade. After emancipation, he was eventually able to find his parents. Glenn's interview is remarkably rich and detailed,...
At a time when aesthetic philosophy defined whiteness in terms of the ability to behold and surveil the world, Phillis Wheatley Peters developed new forms of countervisuality in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Badley's essay focuses on Peters' ekphrastic poetry, which portrays...
REGISTER NOW This workshop will discuss a PRECIRCULATED chapter from Merav Schocken’s dissertation, “Functional Fictions: Practices of Self-Deception in 19th-Century America.” (Please click on the “Download Reading” button above to access the precirculated chapter.) The chapter explores the narrative practices of self-deception that underlie the consolidation of...
Manuel Covo will discuss a chapter from his current book manuscript. The chapter, entitled “The Unfree Trade of an Abolitionist Colony,” explores the economic challenges facing Saint-Domingue in the aftermath of abolition and argues that the war context and the food dependency had long-lasting consequences for...
This workshop will discuss the precirculated first chapter from Jeannine DeLombard’s current book manuscript, “Bound to Respect: Democratic Dignity and the Indignities of Slavery.” (Please click the "Download Reading" button above.) For many of us today, the artifice of legal personhood – the corporate person in particular – provokes...
How did Americans understand citizenship before it was defined in the 14th Amendment? If U.S. citizenship was only defined after abolition and emancipation, how did slavery shape American citizenship? Come and talk about these and related issues of race and civic belonging as Professor Carrie Hyde (UCLA)...
This talk provides a material history of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s first sponsored slave narrative, The Narrative of James Williams (1838), and illuminates how its publication and the controversy that surrounded it shaped the development of the genre as a whole. Teresa Goddu is Associate Professor...
If Henry Box Brown is known to contemporary audiences, then it is as the slave who achieved freedom by mailing himself in a box from Virginia to Philadelphia in 1849. While critics have explored this incredible event, less attention has been focused on Brown’s subsequent...
Brown-bag lunch workshop featuring work in progress by Alpen Razi, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at CalPoly. Sponsored by IHC’s Slavery, Captivity, and the Meaning of Freedom RFG....
“The Republic is one and indivisible”: this principle was the founding dogma of the regime that emerged during the French Revolution. The Republic, however, still “owned” colonies and the plantation societies in the French West Indies could not be more at odds with the principle...
Scott Heerman (History, University of Miami) Thursday, May 4, 2017 / 4:30 PM HSSB 4080 Scott Heerman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Miami and is currently the Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellow at the Huntington Library. Sponsored by the IHC's Slavery, Captivity, and the...
Evelyne Laurent-Perrault (History, UCSB) Thursday, April 13, 2017 / 4:30 PM HSSB 4080 This talk explores the social roles enslaved and free women of African descent played in urban centers, in spite of the fact that they were perceived as the lowest members of society. Sponsored by the IHC's...
Comments by Giuliana Perrone (History, UCSB) Jannie Scott (Center for Black Studies Research, UCSB) Jasmine Yarish (Political Science, UCSB) Thursday, March 9, 2017 / 4:00 PM Lane Room, 3824 Ellison Hall Jannie Scott (Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Black Studies Research, UCSB) "Refashioning Black community in the Wake of Emancipation:...
Ann M. Little (History, Colorado State University) Thursday, February 9, 2017 / 3:00 PM HSSB 4080 Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780) embodies the imperial conquest of North America like no other eighteenth-century figure, yet she has been largely written out of the story of American history. Born and raised to...
Sarah Bond (Classics, University of Iowa) Monday, November 14, 2016 / 5:00 PM HSSB 3041 Sarah Bond, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa, will examine the use of slave labor in monumental building through a broad historical lens. The use of contracted and slave labor...
Sarah Bond (Classics,University of Iowa) Monday, November 14, 2016 / 3:00 PM Public History Seminar Room, HSSB 3208 Sarah Bond, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa, will be leading a seminar on GIS mapping of ancient slavery. Sponsored by the IHC's Slavery, Captivity, and the Meaning...
Giuliana Perrone (History, UCSB) Thursday, November 3, 2016 / 12:00 PM HSSB 4065 Through an examination of suits brought by freed people, this talk explores the role that state courts played in constructing - and reconstructing - the black family. Because they lacked legal pasts, former...
Thursday, May 12 / 5:30 PM Opening address: Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara Street Friday, 13, 2016 / 9:00 AM Conference: HSSB 4080 This interdisciplinary conference gathers scholars working on slavery and captivity across a range of historical contexts, from the chattel slave systems of classical Greece and...
Kostas Vlassopoulos (History & Archeology, University of Crete) Thursday, May 12, 2016 / 5:30 PM Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara Street Once upon a time, the study of Greek slavery was at the forefront in the developing field of slavery studies. But the approaches and perspectives that revolutionized...
Jasmine Yarish (Political Science, UCSB) Tuesday, May 3, 2016/12:00 PM HSSB 3041 Jasmine Yarish, a PhD candidate in Political Science, will present material from her dissertation project, "Reconstructing Home: W.E.B Du Bois, Intersectionality, and Abolition Democracy." Sponsored by the IHC's Slavery, Captivity & the Meaning of Freedom RFG....
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low (History, UC Santa Barbara) Tuesday, April 12, 2016 / 12:00 PM HSSB 4080 Professor Barbieri-Low will lead a discussion of pre-circulated materials from his latest research. For copies of the texts, please email maclean@classics.ucsb.edu. Sponsored by the IHC's Slavery, Captivity, and the Meaning of...
Robert S. Levine (University of Maryland, College Park) Monday, March 7, 2016 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB While most readers are familiar with the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Levine will discuss Douglass’ final autobiography, Life and Times of...
Robert S. Levine (University of Maryland, College Park) Monday, March 7, 2016 / 12:00 PM HSSB 4080 Professor Levine will be leading us in a discussion of The Heroic Slave. Along with Douglass' novella itself (available online as an etext), we will be discussing the following selections from...
Ariela Gross (Gould School of Law, USC) Monday, February 8, 2016, 4:00 PM SS&MS 2135 This talk, jointly authored by Chantal Thomas and Ariela Gross, critiques some publicists and jurists involved in the contemporary campaign against slavery and in the memorialization of the Atlantic slave trade for the...
James F. Brooks (UCSB, History & Anthropology) Thursday, December 3, 2015 / 3:00 PM HSSB 4041 This volume has brought together scholars from anthropology, history, psychology, and ethnic studies to share their original research into the lesser-known stories of slavery in North America and reveal surprising...
Terri Snyder (American Studies, California State University, Fullerton) Monday, November 9, 2015 / 4:00 PM HSSB 4041 Terri Snyder will lead a discussion of her most recent book, The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North Africa (Chicago, 2015). Snyder's research interests include slavery...
Friday, October 16, 2015, 12:00 PM HSSB 3041 A new interdisciplinary Research Focus Group on "Slavery, Captivity & the Meaning of Freedom" will meet for an informal brown-bag lunch to introduce participants to one another and discuss plans for the Fall quarter. All faculty and graduate students...
This RFG brings together faculty and graduate students who study enslavement, manumission, liberation, and freedom from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. The complex, often elusive, concepts of enslavement and freedom are both historically contingent and central to the broader social, economic, political, and...