Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice

University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice 2004-2006

History

University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice 2004-2006
COMMITTEE MEMBERS


Brenda Allen is associate provost and director of institutional diversity at Brown University. She has published widely in the area of culture and cognitive processing and is currently completing a book co-authored with A. Wade Boykin and Robert Jagers entitled The Psychology of African American Experiences: Paradigms of the Past and Present.

Before joining Brown University in 2003, Allen was associate professor of Psychology and assistant to the president and director of institutional diversity at Smith College. While at Smith, Allen received the Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Smith College President's Award for the Promotion of the Smith Design for Diversity.

Paul Armstrong is professor of English at Brown University. His teaching and research concentrate on the modern period, the novel, and the theory of interpretation. He is the author of four books of literary criticism and theory: The Phenomenology of Henry James; The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford; Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation; and Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form. He is also the editor of Norton Critical Editions of E.M. Forster's novel Howards End and of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. From 2001 to 2006, he served as Dean of the College.

Prior to coming to Brown, Armstrong held academic and administrative positions at SUNY – Stony Brook, the University of Oregon, Georgia Tech, and the University of Virginia

Farid Azfar, the Steering Committee's graduate student representative, is a doctoral candidate in Brown's Department of History. He is currently completing a dissertation entitled "Enlightenment as Reformation: Disordered Bodies, Commercial Life, and Utopian Visions of Social Improvement in Britain, 1690-1740." Before coming to Brown, Azfar received a B.A. in International Relations from Tufts University and an M.A. in Geography from the University of Southern California. He has received numerous grants and fellowships, including awards from the Huntington Library, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History.

Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. He is the author of many books, including Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation; Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity; Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories; and The "Jew" in Cinema: From The Golem to Don't Touch My Holocaust. He has also edited or co-edited scholarly anthologies on the Holocaust, genocide and religion, and war crimes. His newest book, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, will appear in 2007. Bartov has received numerous fellowships and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

B. Anthony Bogues is chair of Brown's Department of Africana Studies, where he also is a professor. He is the author or editor of five books in political theory, intellectual history, and Caribbean history, including the award-winning Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals. Since coming to Brown in 1999, he has received numerous teaching awards and honors, including the Royce Professorship, the Hazeltine Citation for Teaching Excellence, and the Presidential Citation for Scholarship and Teaching.

Bogues has held fellowships and visiting professorships at numerous institutions, including the University of the West Indies, Howard University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Cape Town, where he is currently a distinguished fellow at the Center for African Studies. Between 1989 and 1992, he served as chief-of-staff for the late Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley.

James Campbell (Chair) is associate professor of American Civilization, Africana Studies and History at Brown University. He is the author of two books, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa and the recently published Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005. He is also co-editor of a forthcoming anthology, Race, Nation, and Empire in American History, slated to appear in 2007. Campbell has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Carl Sandburg Literary Prize for Non-fiction and the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Prize. Before coming to Brown, he taught at Northwestern University and at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Ross E. Cheit is associate professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University, and Director of Brown's Law and Public Policy Program. A recipient of both a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Cheit clerked for the Oregon Supreme Court and practiced law for several years before joining the Brown faculty. He has published extensively on public and private sector regulation, statutes of limitation, and the problem of righting old wrongs. He is currently finishing a book about the law and politics of child sexual abuse in contemporary America. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Hazeltine Citation for Teaching Excellence and the William G. McLoughlin Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences.

Steve Cornish is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University. Prior to his arrival at Brown, he taught sociology at Dartmouth College, where he also coordinated the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. His scholarly interests are race and ethnicity, the Caribbean, and the politics of popular culture.

Neta C. Crawford is adjunct professor at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies where she was Associate Professor (Research) and headed the global ethics project from 2001 to 2005. She is currently Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Boston University. She has published books and articles about ethics, foreign and military policy, sanctions, humanitarian intervention, slavery, abolition, colonialism and decolonization. Her most recent book, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization and Humanitarian Intervention, won the American Political Science Association Prize for best book in international history and politics in 2003.

Crawford is a member of the Board of Directors of the Academic Council on the United Nations System, of the governing Council of the American Political Science Association. of the editorial board of the American Political Science Review; and of the advisory board of Praxis International, a non-profit organization focused on post-conflict reconciliation and human rights. She also serves on the American Political Science Association's Committee on Professional Ethics, Rights and Freedoms and Boston University's Council on Faculty Diversity and Inclusion. She has held post-doctoral fellowships at Brown, Harvard's Bunting Institute, and the University of Southern California. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Brown ('85) and a PhD from MIT.

Evelyn Hu-DeHart is professor of History and director of Brown's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. She is the author of numerous books and articles in Asian American, Native American, and African American history. Her current research focuses on the history of Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean, including the introduction of Chinese and East Indian contract laborers to supplement or replace African slave labor in the nineteenth century.

Before coming to Brown, Hu-DeHart taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she chaired the Department of Ethnic Studies and directed the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America. She has also taught at the City University of New York, New York University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Arizona, and the University of Michigan.

Vanessa Huang, one of the Steering Committee's undergraduate representatives, received her A.B. in Ethnic Studies in 2006. She is currently campaign and media director at Justice Now, an Oakland-based human rights organization that works with women in prison. Huang has written extensively on race and incarceration, prison abolition, and the impact of the war on terror on communities of color.

Arlene R. Keizer is an associate professor of English and American Civilization at Brown University. Her teaching and scholarship focus on African American and Caribbean literature and culture, particularly on the resurgence of slavery as a theme in late twentieth-century black literature and visual arts. She is the author of Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery.

Before coming to Brown, Keizer taught in the Department of English and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Seth Magaziner, one of the Steering Committee's undergraduate representatives, received his A.B. in History from Brown in 2006. He is currently teaching at the Cresswell Elementary School in Opelousas, Louisiana, under the auspices of Teach for America.

Marion Orr is the Fred Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Brown University. His research focuses on American government and politics, urban politics, race and politics, community organizing, and the politics of urban school reform. He is the author of Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, which won the Policy Studies Organization's Aaron Wildavsky Award, and co-author of The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics and the Challenge of Urban Education, which was named the best book on urban politics by the American Political Science Association. Orr taught at Duke University before joining the Brown faculty in 1999.

Kerry Smith is associate professor of History and East Asian Studies at Brown University. He is the author of A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization, as well as of a number of book chapters and essays on the social and economic transformation of modern Japan. His current research focuses on the public histories of disaster and war. His article "The Showa Hall: Memorializing Japan's War at Home" received the G. Wesley Johnson Prize from the National Council on Public History.

William Tucker, one of the Steering Committee's undergraduate members, received his A.B. in Africana Studies and Public Policy in 2004. He is currently a research associate at the Institute for Community Health Promotion at Brown. A Truman Scholarship recipient, he plans to attend graduate school.

Michael Vorenberg is associate professor of history at Brown, where he teaches courses on the history of law, slavery, race, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. His published work includes Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, as well as essays on black colonization efforts during the Civil War and on Abraham Lincoln's approach to slavery reparations. He is currently working on a history of the impact of the Civil War on American citizenship. Vorenberg taught at SUNY-Buffalo and Harvard University before coming to Brown.