Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History at Howard University, will give a virtual lecture entitled The Persistence of The Past: Coming to Terms with the Long History of Slavery in the Americas on Thursday, February 25 at 7pm.

Register in advance for this Zoom webinar

Based on her recent book Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (Bloomsbury, 2020), in this lecture Professor Araujo explores how  memory of slavery is racialized and gendered. She shows that calls to take down Confederate monuments and pro-slavery statues that became more visible over the last few years and especially during the summer 2020, are more than just attempts to come to terms with the past. Using examples from the United States, Britain, and France, she shows that the debates about the past of slavery are associated with the persistent racial inequalities, racism, and white supremacy which still shape societies where slavery existed.

Ana Lucia Araujo is a full Professor of History at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. Her recent single-authored books include Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Brazil Through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). She is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. She also serves on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review (the journal of the American Historical Association) and the editorial board of Slavery and Abolition. She is a member of the executive board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide Diaspora (ASWAD), the editorial review board of the African Studies Review, and the board of the blog Black Perspectives maintained by the African American Intellectual History Society. Currently, she is working on two book projects: Human in Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery in the Americas (under contract with the University of Chicago Press) and The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (under contract with Cambridge University Press). She just finished Museums and Atlantic Slavery, a short-format book to be published in the Spring 2021 by Routledge in the series Routledge Museums in Focus.