February 26, 2010 | 2.00-4.00 PM

Vincent BROWN|Harvard University

Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness: a Screening & Discussion*

*NYU's Africana Studies will be co-sponsoring this session.

Department of Social & Cultural Analysis 20 Cooper Square | 4th Floor

Our guest

Vincent Brown, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, is a multi-media historian with a keen interest in the political implications of cultural practice.  He teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery. Brown is the author of The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) and producer of an audiovisual documentary about the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits to be broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens on February 9, 2010.

Selected Publications

• “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review, Vol. 114, No. 5 (December 2009): 1231-1249.
• The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)
• “Eating the Dead: Consumption and Regeneration in the History of Sugar,” Food and Foodways: History and Culture of Human Nourishment, Vol. 16, No. 2 (April 2008): 117-126.
• "Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society," in Slavery & Abolition Vol. 24, No. 1 (April 2003): 24-53 (2003)
• "Blackness in Diaspora," in Plantation Society in the Americas Vol. VI, Nos 2&3 (Fall 1999): 305-12 (1999)