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| Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition | |
|---|---|
| Name | Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition |
| Established | 1998 |
| Type | Research center |
| Location | New Haven, Connecticut |
| Affiliation | Yale University |
| Director | David Blight |
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition is a research institute based at Yale University that concentrates on the historical study of slavery, acts of resistance, and processes of abolition across the Americas, Europe, and Africa. The Center engages historians, archivists, curators, and educators from institutions such as the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Smithsonian Institution to advance scholarship and public history. Its work intersects with scholars and projects associated with Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Cape Town.
The Center was founded in 1998 through support from philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman alongside scholars from Yale College, Yale Law School, and the Yale Department of History, with early leadership including figures connected to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the American Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians. Its establishment followed major conferences and symposia that drew participants from the African American Historic Places initiative, the Marcus Garvey archival projects, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database research community, and transnational networks linked to Paul Gilroy and Eric Williams. Over time the Center has hosted visiting scholars from the University of Ghana, the University of the West Indies, the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, and the Universidade Federal da Bahia.
The Center's mission foregrounds archival research on slavery and abolition involving collections tied to Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Toussaint Louverture, and William Wilberforce, and connects interpretive frameworks developed by scholars such as Eric Foner, Saidiya Hartman, Ibram X. Kendi, Annette Gordon-Reed, and C.L.R. James. Research themes include comparative studies linking the Haitian Revolution, the American Civil War, the British abolitionist movement, the Brazilian slave system, the Spanish colonial period, and the Ottoman Empire's engagements in slavery. The Center supports work on legal and political transformations involving statutes like the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation, the British Slave Trade Act 1807, the Brazilian Lei Áurea, and judicial decisions such as Dred Scott v. Sandford.
Core programs include seminar series that attract presenters from the Modern Language Association, the Social Science Research Council, the Royal Historical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as fellowship cohorts drawing grantees from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacArthur Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. The Center runs workshops on digital humanities methods in collaboration with the Omeka community, the Digital Public Library of America, the Mapping Slavery Project, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database team, while also sponsoring dissertation fellowships for graduate students from Yale Divinity School, Brown University, Duke University, and the University of Chicago. Annual conferences have convened panels featuring research on figures like Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Alexander Hamilton, and Simón Bolívar.
The Center facilitates edited volumes, journal special issues, and working papers produced with publishers and journals including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, The Journal of American History, Slavery & Abolition (journal), and American Historical Review. Its fellows and affiliates have published monographs and articles on subjects such as plantation economies tied to Caribbean history archives, comparative legal histories involving Roman law antecedents, and biographies of individuals like Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, while collaborating with editors from Princeton University Press and Yale University Press. The Center's output often engages citation networks that include scholarship by Stephanie E. Smallwood, Sven Beckert, Manisha Sinha, and Kenneth Morgan.
Public-facing initiatives include lecture series open to audiences from New Haven, Connecticut Historical Society, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and K–12 partnerships with the New Haven Public Schools, museum collaborations with the New-York Historical Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and curricular materials informed by standards from the National Council for the Social Studies. Programs have linked oral-history projects with communities represented by descendants of Gullah, Maroon, and Afro-Brazilian traditions, and have organized exhibitions alongside curators from the Brooklyn Museum and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
The Center collaborates with international and national entities such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the International Council of Museums, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and university centers including the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, the Slavery Studies Centre at University of Nottingham, and the Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at Brown University. It participates in research consortia addressing restitution and reparations dialogues involving representatives from Jamaica, Ghana, Benin, and the Netherlands, and has hosted delegations including staff from the House Committee on the Judiciary and cultural heritage experts from the International African Institute.
Located within facilities near the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library on the Yale University campus, the Center supports archival projects that draw on collections from the Gilder Lehrman Collection at multiple repositories, the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, the Edward Smith-Stanley papers, and the Freeman papers. Its staff collaborates with archivists at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers Project, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and regional archives such as the Massachusetts Historical Society and Liverpool Record Office to digitize manuscripts, letters, runaway advertisements, and plantation records for scholarly and public access.
Category:Research institutes