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Alexander Byrd to Speak Mar. 24 as Part of Africana Studies Series

Story posted March 20, 2008

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Alexander Byrd.

Alexander Byrd, a scholar in the area of Afro America and assistant professor of history at Rice University, will give a talk titled "The Atlantic World: A View from Late Eighteenth-Century Jamaica" at 4 p.m. Monday, March 24, 2008, in the John Brown Russwurm African-American Center on the Bowdoin College campus.

Byrd's talk is open to the public and admission is free.

Alexander Byrd's area of expertise is Afro America, especially black life in the Atlantic world and the Jim Crow South. He is presently completing a history of free and forced transatlantic black migration in the period of the American Revolution in a book titled Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (LSU Press, forthcoming).

He has published essays addressing current debates over the nativity of Olaudah Equiano, and treating the social consequences of violence in the transatlantic slave trade. Other published work addresses teaching the history of lynching, and explores practicalities of civic engagement in African American studies research. Byrd's oral history of Magdalene Dulin is in Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South.

Byrd's next major research project is a study of race and urban life in the United States through a history of two city high schools and their respective neighborhoods (for which he was recently awarded a Collaborative Research Grant from the Humanities Research Center).

He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He is a member of the American Historical Association and a life member of the Southern Historical Association.

Following a major forum on Africana studies in the spring of 2007, Bowdoin's Africana Studies Program will host a series of talks by distinguished scholars throughout the 2007-08 academic year.

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