Featured Speakers
Ira Berlin, The University of Maryland
Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, has written broadly on the history of slavery and emancipation in the United States and the larger Atlantic world. He is author of Slaves Without Masters (1974), winner of the Best First Book Prize of the National Historical Society; Free at Last (1992), winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize; and Freedom’s Solders: The Black Military Experience (1998), winner of the American Historical Association’s J. Franklin Jameson Prize. Professor Berlin has co-edited three volumes of documents in the Freedman and Southern Society Project, which he founded and directed until 1991. His book Many Thousands Gone (1998) has become the standard account of the first two centuries of slavery in colonial America; his newest book, Generations of Captivity, was published in 2003. Professor Berlin is past president of the Organization of American Historians and currently an OAH Distinguished Lecturer.
Barry Gaspar, Duke University
Barry Gaspar, Professor of History at Duke University , concentrates on comparative slave systems, with a special interest in the development of slave society and the evolution of slave life in the United States and the Caribbean . He has published articles on slave resistance and social control. Professor Gaspar is the author of Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (1985). He co-edited More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (1996), A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (1997), and Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas (2003). As the plantation complex expanded and became more
highly organized, the people of Western and Southwestern Africa increasingly fell victim to a widening net of enslavement and slave trading. Africans struggled against enslavement in a variety of ways. Professor Gaspar is currently examining the patterns of slave revolt in the Caribbean and North America to show how Africans struggled to free themselves from the yoke of bondage.
Stephen J. Greenblatt, Harvard University
Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard
University. His areas of specialization include Shakespeare, 16th- and 17th-century
English literature, the literature of travel and exploration, and literary
theory.
Greenblatt’s publications include the following books: Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Modern Culture; Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England; Renaissance Self-Fashioning: >From More to Shakespeare; Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles; and Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley. In addition he is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and the Associate General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
He serves on the editorial or advisory boards of numerous journals and is an editor and cofounder of Representations. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim, Howard and Kyoto University Foundations, the American Council of Learned Societies. He has received the James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA, the British Council Prize in the Humanities, and the Mellon Distinguished Humanist Award. He has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, and has served as president of the Modern Language Association of America.
Greenblatt also taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He has lectured widely and has held numerous visiting professorships. His named lecture series include the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, the Carpenter Lecturers at the University of Chicago, and the University Lectures at Princeton. He received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from Yale University, a second B.A. from Cambridge University, and his PhD from Yale.