July 5, 2011

Center for Africana Studies hosts institute with NEH grant

The Center for Africana Studies is once again hosting its five-week summer institute, “Slaves, Soldiers, Rebels: Black Resistance in the Tropical Atlantic, 1760–1888,” on the Homewood campus.

Twenty-five faculty members from colleges and universities across the country arrived in Baltimore in late June for the start of the summer institute, which continues through July 29. The goal of the institute is to present new scholarship on the black Atlantic to history professors and lecturers who may not be specialists in the subject.

Sessions are being led by the Krieger School’s Department of History faculty members Michael Johnson and Franklin Knight, who is also the center’s director, along with visiting scholars who are leaders in their fields. Each week of the institute features a different theme, including Atlantic connections, the English and Dutch Caribbean, the Haitian revolution, the United States and Iberian Americans.

The summer institute co-directors are Ben Vinson, vice dean for centers and interdepartmental programs at Johns Hopkins and an executive board member of the Center for Africana Studies; Stewart King, a professor of history at Mount Angel Seminary in Oregon; and Natalie Zacek, a lecturer in history and American studies at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.

The institute is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The initial grant, for the summer 2009 presentation of the institute, was $200,000, and this year’s grant is $183,000.