As a prelude to the release of the book based on the work of the Yale and Slavery Research Project, this panel discussion focuses on how elite universities, their founders, and faculty over time, have used, benefitted from, and understood the story of enslavement in the North America. It also examines how successive generations of historians have written and re-written the story of slavery in relation to the nation and its origins. This includes debates over enslavement as lived experience, as migration, as a massive political and economic problem, and as a question of memory and redress, among other topics. Speakers will address the many questions at the heart of the problem of how universities are attempting to face their past, especially in relation to race and slavery. The program will be moderated by David Blight, who has led the Yale and Slavery Research Project and is the principal author of Yale and Slavery: A History (Yale University Press, February 2024).
Sponsored by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Belonging at Yale; the Office of the President; and the Yale and Slavery Research Project
Moderator: David W. Blight, Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; Sterling Professor of History, Yale University
Speakers:
Leslie Harris, Professor of History at Northwestern University
Scott Spillman, Gilder Lehrman Center Postdoctoral Associate, Fall 2023
Rachel L. Swarns, Professor of journalism at New York University
Craig Wilder, Barton L. Weller Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology