Center for African American History

Dr. Sherwin K. Bryant

Director

Sherwin K. Bryant is Associate Professor of African American Studies and History. He is also the Co-Director of the Andean Cultures and Histories Working Group housed in the Buffett Institute for Global Studies.  He is the author of: Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito, (UNC Press, 2014); and co-editor of Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora, (University of Illinois Press, 2012).  As an historian of colonial Afro-Latin America and the Atlantic/Pacific Worlds, Dr. Bryant works at the intersections of cultural, legal, social history and political economy, with an emphasis upon Black life in the Kingdoms of New Granada and Quito (what is now modern Colombia and Ecuador).Professor Bryant specializes in the histories of slavery and race in colonial Latin America with a eye towards questions of governance, political economy, law and legal practice. Bryant is currently working on two book-length projects—a study of eighteenth-century Black life in the Pacific lowlands of Quito and New Granada (Colombia and Ecuador); and exploration of slaves’ lived experiences within the contraband slave trade throughout the Spanish empire.

Sam C. Tenorio

Graduate Research Assistant

Sam C. Tenorio is a doctoral candidate in African American Studies with a subfield in Political Theory (ABD). They have an M.A. in African American Studies from Northwestern (2013) and a B.A. from University of California, Irvine in History and Women’s Studies (2010). Their dissertation, entitled “Slave Ship Ahoy, Black to Anarchy: Western Spatiality, Race Governance, Black Mobility” revolves around black radical practices of spatial escapism and self-immolation, and their foreclosure amid the West’s political horizon. They maintain broad scholarly interest in black political thought, anarchism, gender and queer studies, and spatial theory.

Dr. Darlene Clark Hine

Inaugural Director
Darlene Clark Hine (PhD Kent State University, 1975) is a leading historian of the African American experience who helped found the field of black women’s history and has been one of its most prolific scholars. A past-president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and the winner of numerous honors and awards, she is the Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern. Her numerous publications include The African-American Odyssey, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950, The Harvard Guide to American History, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History, More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America, Speak Truth to Power: Black Professional Class in United States History, and “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women’s History. She has been awarded fellowships and grants by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Rockefeller Foundation.