Vincent Brown to deliver April 17 Kuroda Lecture

"Designing Histories of Slavery for the Age of the Database" is the title of the annual Tad Kuroda Lecture, to be given by Vincent Brown of Harvard University at 8 p.m. Friday, April 17, in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public.

Brown, the Charles Warren Professor of History at Harvard, is also a professor of African and African American studies and director of the university’s history design studio. He explains, “Multimedia scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been, could be, and should be represented.  By wrestling creatively and collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by social history of slavery, I hope to chart new pathways for pondering history’s most painful and vexing subjects.  This presentation considers three graphic histories of slavery— a web-based animation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a cartographic narrative of the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760-61, and a web-based archive of enslaved family lineages in Jamaica and Virginia — that illustrate how the archive of slavery is more than the records bequeathed to us by the past; the archive also includes the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to see its traces, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities.”

Brown’s web site notes that he 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.

He is the author of The Reaper’s Garden:  Dean and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008), which in 2009 won the Merle Curti Award and the James A. Rawey Prize, both from the Organization of American Historians, and the Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Historical Association.

The Kuroda Lecture at Skidmore is a high point of the biannual Kuroda Symposium, which is co-hosted by the American Studies, Government, and History departments. The symposium and lecture are named in honor of the distinguished Skidmore history professor Tad Kuroda (1940-2010).