Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center Announces Spring Lecture Series

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale is hosting the following series of free, public events during the spring semester.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale is hosting the following series of free, public events during the spring semester. 

A forum on genocide and slavery will take place on January 22 in the Luce Hall auditorium, beginning at 5:30 p.m. Ben Kiernan, who is the director of the Yale Genocide Studies Program, will speak on Australian Aborigines and Native Americans; Seymour Drescher, University of Pittsburgh, on comparisons between the Nazi Holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade; Kevin McBride, director of research at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, on the genocide and enslavement of the Pequot Indians; and Crystal Feimster, lecturer and post-doctoral fellow in the history and African-American studies departments at Yale, on lynching in the U.S. South after Reconstruction. A reception will follow at 7 p.m. in the Luce Hall Common Room, 34 Hillhouse Avenue.

On January 29 Sylviane Diouf, New York University, author of “Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas,” will give a talk titled “Muslim Literacy and Slave Resistance in the Antebellum United States.” The talk, which is co-sponsored with the African American Studies Department, University Chaplain’s Office, Afro-American Cultural Center and Mohammed Islamic Center, will be held at 6 p.m. in the Luce Hall auditorium. A reception sponsored by the Islamic Center will precede the lecture at 5 p.m. in the Luce Hall Common Room.

On February 8, 10 a.m.-noon, the Gilder Lehrman Center will host a symposium at Baruch College Conference Center in New York (151 E. 25th Street, 7th floor) on the subject of slavery in New York and its legacy. Center director David Brion Davis will lead the symposium. Papers will be presented by Graham Hodges, Colgate University; Walter Johnson, New York University; and Martia Goodson and Clarence Taylor, both of Baruch College of the City University of New York.

On February 13, Peter Bardaglio, Goucher College, author of “Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South,” will deliver a lecture titled “Growing Up in the Age of Emancipation: African American Boys and the Reconstruction of Self.”

On February 27, Walter Johnson, New York University, author of “Soul to Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market,” will speak on “An American Amistad: The Creole Case of 1841.”

Edward Daniels, a recent graduate of Yale College, will base his March 27 talk, “Bishop Henry Turner and the Emancipation Moment in Washington, D.C.,” on his award-winning Yale senior essay.

Another recent Yale graduate, Benjamin Soskis, will base his lecture of April 2 on his senior essay, the winner of the 1998 Wrexham Prize for the best senior essay in the field of humanities. A writer for the New Republic, Soskis will talk on Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland.

On April 17, Sue Peabody of Washington State University in Vancouver will give the last lecture of the series, “Slave, Subject, Citizen: Gender and the Transition to Freedom in the French Caribbean, 1635-1848.” A fellow of the Gilder Lehrman Center, Peabody is the author of the acclaimed study, “There are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancient Regime.”

Unless otherwise specified, all events are at 4:15 p.m. in Room 203 of Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue. For late updates, see the Gilder Lehrman Center website: www.yale.edu/glc.

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Media Contact

Dorie Baker: dorie.baker@yale.edu, 203-432-1345