October 3, 2015
This conference is closed to the public.
A network of specialists on comparative slavery—called the Working Group—is based at Harvard, but includes colleagues from neighboring universities such as MIT, Boston University, and Brown University. The Working Group seeks to promote a new cycle of comparative studies of slavery and to define a transregional doctoral field in history. Taking advantage of the significant growth of scholarship concerning slavery in Latin America and Africa during the past two decades, the Working Group revisits some of the questions posed by the traditional comparative literature on slavery and identifies exciting new areas for future research. Unlike previous comparative efforts, which centered on the United States and Latin America, the Working Group aims to fully integrate Africa (including African slaving practices) into the analysis. The Group also seeks to integrate the case of Cuba, which remains understudied, even though the island became one of the major slave societies in the Americas during the nineteenth century and imported Africans longer than any other country in the hemisphere.
Convener
Alejandro de la Fuente
Faculty Associate. Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, Department of History; Professor of African and African American Studies, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University.