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Sherwin Bryant

Assistant Professor of African American Studies and History

Address:
African American Studies Department
Crowe 5-125
1860 S. Campus Dr.
Evanston, IL 60208-2209

Phone: 847-491-3756

Email: s-bryant@northwestern.edu

Research Interests:
Latin American History and Historiography, all periods
Colonial Latin America
Comparative Slavery (Gender and Sexuality)
Slavery and the Law (Legal History)
African Diaspora (early modern)

Courses:
HUM 102/211 (Black Freedom, African Justice) Winter 2009

Degrees:
Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 2005
M.A. The Ohio State University, History, 1998
B.A. North Carolina Central University, History and Education, 1995

Current Research:
Sherwin Bryant (PhD Ohio State University, 2005) is a member of the Department of African American Studies with a courtesy joint appointment in the History Department.  He specializes in colonial Latin American History with a particular emphasis upon slavery, race, and the early modern African Diaspora.  His first book project, tentatively entitled "Rivers of Gold, Sweet Valleys, and Sordid Cities:  Slavery and the Struggle for Autonomy and Rights in the Kingdom of Quito, 1690-1810," grows out of his doctoral dissertation and offers the first comprehensive analysis of slavery and slave life in the north Andes  (Ecuador and southern Colombia).  It explores the untold story of slavery and the lives of slaves by comparing three industries (gold mining, sugar production, and urban slavery) within three regions of the kingdom—Barbacoas (southern Colombia), the Chota-Mira valley just north of Quito, and the coastal port-city of Guayaquil.  Here, Bryant explores how the institution of slavery was shaped and reshaped through a series of negotiations between slaves, slave owners and the colonial state.  He is the co-editor of Africans to Spanish America (Under contract with University of Illinois Press) with Ben Vinson and Rachel O’Toole. His articles on slavery and resistance have appeared in Colonial Latin American Review and The Americas. A Fulbright recipient and Ford Foundation Fellow, Bryant was recently an Institute Fellow at Northwestern's Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, where he continued work on Rivers of Gold while starting a new project exploring contaband slave trading in the Pacific and Andean worlds of eighteenth- century Panama and Colombia.

Recent Publications:
Rivers of Gold, Sweet Valleys, and Sordid Cities: Slavery and the Struggle for Autonomy  and Rights in the Kingdom of Quito, 1690-1810, (in progress).
Africans to Spanish America: New Directions co-edited with Ben Vinson and Rachel  O’Toole (University of Illinois Press, Forthcoming 2010).

Selected Articles and Book Chapters:
"Finding Freedom in Colonial Quito" in the Ecuador Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Carlos de la Torre, Steve Striffler  (Duke University Press 2008) 52-67.

"Finding Gold, Forming Slavery: The Creation of a Classical Slave Society, Popayán,  1600-1800," The Americas, 63.1 (2006): 81-112.

"Enslaved Rebels, Fugitives, and Litigants:  The Resistance Continuum in Colonial  Quito," Colonial Latin American Review, 13.1 (2004): 7-46.