Slavery Online: Three Projects from History Design Studio

Monday, September 19, 2016 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM

New media scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been, could be, and should be represented. By wrestling creatively and collectively with some difficult interpretive problems presented by social history of slavery, this lecture hopes to inspire new conversations about history’s most painful subjects.

Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of History and African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, considers three graphic histories of slavery: a cartographic narrative of the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760-61, a web-based archive of enslaved family lineages in Jamaica and Virginia, and a short video conversation on the relationship between the legacy of slavery and mass incarceration in the United States. Together they illustrate some of the significant virtues and limitations of doing history online.