The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University will host the first talks of the newly established David Brion Davis Lecture Series on the Yale campus, February 7–9.
The inaugural lecturer of the series is distinguished historian of African slavery, Joseph Miller. Miller is the T. Cary Johnson Jr. Professor of History at the University of Virginia and is a widely published scholar and recognized authority on the history of Africa and of world slavery. The topic of his lectures will be “The Problem of Slavery as History.”
The title is “in honor of David Brion Davis’ seminal and still fundamental series, ‘The Problem of Slavery…,’ ” says Miller.
The first lecture, also titled “The Problem of Slavery as History,” will examine “slaving” not as a static institution, but as a dynamic and dialectical process that has existed since the beginning of human history. The lecture skims through some 30,000 years to hint at recurrent patterns through which slaving has moved throughout the world. The first lecture will be held February 7, 4 p.m. in the mezzanine of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St. There will be a reception following the lecture.
In the second lecture, “History and Slavery as Problems in Africa,” Miller discusses the failure of 20th–century scholars of African history to imagine that slavery could have existed in Africa. He will apply his concept of slaving as a dynamic historical process to sketch the ways in which Africa resembled the European–Asian world in its reliance on isolated and vulnerable individuals as slaves at most key junctures in its past.
The final lecture in the series, titled “Problematizing Slavery in the Americas as History,” examines the inherent flaws of using American slavery as a paradigm for understanding slaving elsewhere, most notably, in the ancient Mediterranean, the Islamic world, Asia or Africa. The lecture will look at American slaving in the context of the development of Atlantic capitalism, suggesting parallels with Africa in the era of mercantilism.
The second and third lectures will take place in the auditorium of Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue, on February 8 and 9, respectively. Both begin at 4 p.m.
“The David Brion Davis Lecture Series in the History of Slavery, Race and Its Legacies” honors the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History and the founder of the Gilder Lehrman Center. For more than four decades, Davis has been one of the world’s leading scholars of slavery and abolition in an international context. The Center will combine with Yale University Press each year to publish the three lectures in a series of books. New Gilder Lehrman Center Director David W. Blight, the Class of ‘54 Professor of American History, will invite each year’s speaker and work with the Press to usher the books into publication. The series is intended to be a major event in the intellectual life of Yale, and the books to offer new scholarship and new insights into the problem of slavery and its legacies in the modern world.
In subsequent years, the Davis lecturers will include David Richardson, University of Hull, UK, a distinguished economic historian of the slave trade and a co–author and creator of “The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Data Base”; James B. Stewart, Macalaster College, Minnesota, prominent scholar of American abolitionism and author of “Wendell Phillips and Holy Warriors: Abolitionists and American Slavery,” among other books; and Caryl Phillips, the widely acclaimed Afro–British novelist and non–fiction writer, whose titles include “Cambridge,” “Crossing the River,” “Nature of Blood” and “Distant Shore.”
For more information on the David Brion Davis Lecture Series or other Gilder Lehrman Center events, please call (203) 432–3339 or visit www.yale.edu/glc.
