AAIHS 2025 Conference–Registration is Now Open!
We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for our tenth annual conference! Please visit our conference website to secure your spot at the conference. We are excited to feature more than 40 amazing sessions this year. When you register, be sure to purchase tickets for the luncheon sessions. And please take advantage of the early bird option–open now until the end of this month.
About Our Conference Theme:
“Slavery and its Afterlives”
In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2008), historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman describes her personal quest to “reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making of human commodities.” She continues, “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.” This, Harman explains, “is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.”
Since the publication of Hartman’s groundbreaking memoir, the phrase “afterlife of slavery” has been deployed across humanities fields to underscore the significant connection between periods before and after slavery. For its tenth anniversary annual conference, the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) invites individual and panel proposals that grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlives in the United States and throughout the broader African diaspora. Ongoing social, political, and cultural developments demand continued preservation, dissemination, and engagement with the experiences and ideas of African Americans and others across the African diaspora.
By grappling with the theme of “Slavery and Its Afterlives,” AAIHS encourages conference participants to reflect on how histories of African and African-descended peoples from slavery to the present continue to shape and haunt our present and futures in familiar and new ways. We hope this invitation prompts scholars, activists, artists, and other intellectuals to interrogate notions of change, continuity, and progress, all key elements of historical inquiry.
Keynote Speaker:
Deirdre Cooper Owens
Deirdre Cooper Owens, an award-winning historian and popular public speaker, is a professor of history in New England. As a teacher and public speaker, Cooper Owens credits where she was raised as key factors in her love for weaving together history and storytelling. She remembers vividly sitting on the front porch with her granddaddy in SC’s Low Country listening raptly to the ghost stories he told about the enslaved in his Gullah tongue. She was influenced by these experiences and similar ones that centered oral history. It is what ultimately led her to devote her life to become a professional historian.
Cooper Owens is a proud graduate of two historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the all-women’s Bennett College and Clark Atlanta University. She earned her Ph.D. in history at UCLA and has had a number of prestigious fellowships at the University of Virginia, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. As one of the country’s most “acclaimed experts in U.S. history,” according to Time Magazine, Cooper Owens is steadily working towards making history more accessible and inspiring for all. Politically, she proudly works to advance reproductive justice.
Friday, March 14, 2025
Luncheon: Publishing Global Black History Workshop
Sponsored by Global Black Thought, the new journal of the African American Intellectual History Society
This session, sponsored by Global Black Thought, brings together some of the nation’s leading editors to discuss the nuts and bolts of publishing in the field of Black history. The panelists will discuss some of the challenges as well as opportunities for scholars who are writing books on the lives and ideas of Black people in the United States and throughout the globe.
Saturday, March 15, 2025
Luncheon: Film Screening of ‘How Do You Remember the Days of Slavery?’
Featured Speaker: Vincent Brown
Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery in the Americas. Brown is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) and Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020), and he is producer of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), an audiovisual documentary broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and the short video series The Bigger Picture (2022) for PBS Digital Studios.
About the Film
A 20-minute documentary following Professor Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, as he travels to Jamaica at the invitation of the Jamaican Ministry of Culture, to speak at the island’s second annual Chief Takyi Day in St Mary Parish. The little explored history of Chief Takyi has long fascinated Professor Brown, in 2020, after more than a decade of dedicated research across multiple continents, he published his award-winning book, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, shedding crucial light on the brutally suppressed revolt which paved the road to abolition. The invitation to attend Chief Takyi Day was recognition of this work, in the documentary we meet historians, politicians, activists and perhaps Takyi’s most dedicated advocate, Derrick ‘Black X’ Robinson.