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Slavery and Justice Undergraduate Research Award

Slavery and Justice Undergraduate Research Awards allow students to enhance research projects initiated during lecture courses and seminars. The theme for the 2010-11 year is "Slavery and Capitalism." Projects can be historical or contemporary, and may address the relationship of capitalism and slavery in any part of the world. Students in any discipline and those who are completing senior theses are eligible to apply.

Awards of $500 are intended to support additional research and the preparation of a poster for display at the Brown-Harvard collaborative conference on Slavery and Capitalism in the United States, to be held April 7-9, 2011.

Projects might explore:

  • plantation archaeology and the material culture of slavery
  • visual or literary representations of the slave market
  • price series of slave-grown commodities
  • the relationship of Northern economic development to slavery
  • Congressional voting patterns on economic policies pertaining to slavery
  • historical patterns of interregional migration and population growth
  • GIS mapping of plantation space
  • commercial ventures of Rhode Island merchants and planters
  • questions of (un)freedom and the market in philosophy, religion, or political theory

2011 Award Recipients

The winners of the 2011 Slavery and Justice Undergraduate Research Award were:

Elizabeth Caldwell
"'What is the Man Good For?' Reputation, Credit, and Shareholding Economies of the Antebellum South"

Arthur Matuszewski
"The Ethics of Servitude: Incarceration, Labor, and the American Project"

Meghna Philip
"The Rhode Island Prison System: Visions of Labor and Capitalism, 1870-1920"

Tyler Jackson Rogers
"AlterNative Histories of Race and Slavery"

Isaac Schlecht
"Economic Modeling of the Human Trafficking Market"

Questions may be directed to Professor Seth Rockman or Dean Besenia Rodriguez.