New ideas, enlightening conversations, cutting-edge research, tomorrow's trends: it's all here in the podcast series from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery. Listen to our visiting scholars as they share their knowledge and passions. These exclusive interviews explore a world of fascinating topics.

Linford D. Fisher Associate Professor of History at Brown University explores the little-known intertwined histories of African and Native American slaveries in New England and the wider Atlantic. All across the Americas, in every colonial context, Native Americans were captured, enslaved, and sent to other regions to work in houses, on farms, and on plantations. Professor Fisher explains how the enslavement of Natives and Africans differed and were similar over time.

Linford Fisher is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. He specializes in religion, Native Americans, and slavery in colonial America. Fisher is the author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America and the co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island’s Founding Father. He is currently working on a book-length project on Indian and African enslavement in colonial New England and several select English Atlantic islands, including Bermuda, Barbados, and Jamaica.

Leo Garofalo, Associate Professor of History, Connecticut College discusses the lives of Afro-Iberians sailors, soldiers, travelers, and traders in the Spanish Empire. From 1471 to 1700, enslaved and free African and European-born African people made up perhaps twenty-percent of southern Iberia’s urban populations. They became part of Spanish expansion into the Americas and Asia and raiding and trading in Africa. Through their movement and resettlements, they helped shape Iberian, Ibero-American, and Philippine societies.

Dr. Garofalo specializes in Latin American and Caribbean, history, the African Diaspora in Latin America, and Peru and the Andes, including the early history of Native Andeans and Afro Peruvians. He is the co-editor with Kathryn Joy McKnight of Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early-Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812, and with Erin O'Connor of Documenting Latin America: Gender, Race, and Empire, vol. I and II.

Caree Banton discusses her project More Auspicious Shores:” Post-emancipation Barbadian Emigrants in Pursuit of Freedom, Citizenship, and Nationhood in Liberia, 1834-1912. This project uses the narrative of the efforts of a group of fifty Barbadian families to emigrate to Liberia to help African Americans build up a black nation that would be the envy of the world.  Banton highlights shifting meanings and experiences of freedom, citizenship, and nationhood and the changing salience of race in the making of a transatlantic black identity.

Caree Banton is an Assistant Professor of History and African and African American Studies at the University of Arkansas and was a 2016 Lapidus Center Fellow. She received her PhD from Vanderbilt University.

Nicole Wright discusses her project, which explores literary treatments of law, judgment, representation, and slavery in British and American fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Nicole Wright was a 2016 Lapidus Center Fellow. She received her PhD from Yale and is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder

Dr. Natalie Joy, the inaugural Fellow at the Lapidus Center discusses her book project, Abolitionists and Indians in the Antebellum Era, which considers the relationship between Native Americans and the American antislavery movement from the 1820s through the 1850s. She argues that Indians played a crucial role in shaping abolitionism during this period; and in return, received support from the antislavery movement as they fought against the loss of their land.

Natalie Joy received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles and is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Northern Illinois University.

A Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery series

Dr. Nafees Khan presents “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database” and the “African Origins Project.” He shares his thoughts about how the slave trade is taught in schools; how slavery and the slave trade are represented in public memory in the USA and Brazil; and what the implications of digital humanities are for education.

Nafees M. Khan is a Visiting Scholar at Emory University. He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Studies from Emory. He has served as the Curriculum Development Advisor on the “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database” as well as the Diaspora Liaison/Outreach Coordinator and Project Manager for the “African Origins Project.” His current research interests incorporate the legacies of slavery as related to education and the experiences of Afro-Brazilians, African-Americans, and other diaspora communities.

A Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery series

Dr. Leslie Harris discusses the importance of cities in the history of slavery, particularly New York; she explores the characteristics of urban life in slavery; and compares the enslaved community’s experiences in New York and Savannah. A native of New Orleans, Harris is working on a history of the city in the 20th century. In this podcast, she explores the similarities and differences between her city and New York today and during slavery.

Leslie Harris, Associate Professor of History at Emory University is the award-winning author of “In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863.” She co-edited “Slavery in New York” with Ira Berlin, and the award-winning “Freedom and Slavery in Savannah” with Daina Ramey Berry. Dr. Harris was a Fellow in Residence at the Schomburg Center and is a member of the Lapidus Center’s Council of Advisors.

A Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery series

In this illuminating conversation, Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed and Dr. David Blight discuss the writing of biographies. Gordon-Reed is working on a biography of Thomas Jefferson, and Blight is writing a full biography of Frederick Douglass.

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, a Professor of History at Harvard University, and the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Queen's College, Oxford University.  She received the 2008 National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History for  “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.” Gordon-Reed is a member of the Lapidus Center’s Council of Advisors.

David W. Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. Among his numerous publications are “American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era;” and “A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation." His book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory”  received eight awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.  Dr. Blight is a member of the Lapidus Center’s Council of Advisors.