Professor Gunja Sen Gupta is joined in conversation by Prof. Edward Rugemer, Yale University, and Prof. Swapna Banarjee, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, for a conversation on her recent co-authored book Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire(University of California Press, 2023). What does the story of human bondage look like when we cross its North Atlantic boundaries, and step into the disparate but connected worlds of the Caribbean, Brazil, and the Indo-Pacific? Join the historians on this panel as they move through Caribbean plantations and South Carolina legislatures; follow the trail of domestic workers from India to Europe, of Africans landed in India on Arab vessels, and Indian concubines in the Persian/Arabian gulf states; meet intercontinental human rights activists, and visit American merchants, “free cotton” entrepreneurs, and slaveholders in the 19^th century Indian Ocean world. The exchanges that transpire will reveal how capitalism, empire, and information technologies integrated distant shores into international networks of encounter, exchange and contest that shaped the modern world and its structural legacies.

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023 at 5:30 PM

On Zoom; pre-registration required

https://brooklyn-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0lceysrzMqHtAL2dkJgiTlPb1XqPK84eASe#/registration

Biographies:

Gunja SenGupta is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her current research and teaching interests lie in 19th-century U.S. history within global contexts of slavery and colonialism. She is the author of the books For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas (1996); From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918 (2009), and with Awam Amkpa, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (2023), as well as numerous scholarly journals like the American Historical Review, Journal of Negro (now African American) History, Civil War History, Kansas History, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Transition Magazine. Her work has been funded by fellowships and grants awarded by Mrs. Giles Whiting, Wolfe, Tow, Mellon, foundations among others, as well most recently by CUNY’s Mellon-funded Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI-CUNY).

Edward Rugemer is a historian of slavery and abolition at Yale University. His first book, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (2008), which explores how the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean shaped the coming of the American Civil War, won the Avery Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians, among many others. His second book, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World (2018), a comparative history of Jamaica and South Carolina, won the Jerry H. Bentley Book prize of the World History Association. Rugemer’s current projects include editing the Cambridge History of the Caribbean. Rugemer has also published articles in the William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, Slavery and Abolition, Reviews in American History, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.                                                      

Swapna M. Banerjee is professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research lies at the intersection of gender, class, race, and ethnicity in colonial South Asia and it focuses on women, servants, children, fathers, masculinity, domesticity, and family. Her recent monograph, Fathers in a Motherland: Imagining Fatherhood in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2022), interrogates the strong connection between fatherhood and masculinity. Her book Men, Women and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2004) employed the lens of employer-servant relationships to understand the construction of national identity in colonial Bengal. She is the co-editor of Mapping Women’s History: Recovery, Resistance and Activism in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Stree-Samya, 2022). On a fellowship from the Australian Research Council, she is currently working on a collaborative research project, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain, 1780-1945 (https://ayahsandamahs.com/). It historicizes the traveling Indian caregivers (nannies) who traveled with British and Indian families from India to Britain, Australia, and other parts of the empire from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Banerjee’s research has been supported by NEH-funded American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research fellowship, PSC-CUNY Grants, Whiting Fellowship and Wolfe Fellowship from Brooklyn College, and the Distinguished Scholars fellowship of the Advanced Research Collective of the Graduate Center of CUNY.                           

Sponsored by: The Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College, in cooperation with the departments of English, History, Modern Languages and Literatures, and Political Science.