Marcus Rediker (author of Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping S

You’re invited to a special additional edition of Humanities in the Village, an event series in partnership with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which aims to make scholarship publicly accessible.

This event features Marcus Rediker, author most recently of Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea. We'll celebrate this new volume by hearing from the author about the project of the book, which is provides definitive, sweeping account of the Underground Railroad's long-overlooked maritime origins. A leading scholar of maritime history, Rediker puts his command of archival research on full display in this luminous portrait of the Atlantic waterfront as a place of conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation. Freedom Ship is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the complete story of one of North America's most significant historical moments.

We are delighted that Nadia Nurhussein and Harris Feinsod will join Rediker in conversation.

Order FREEDOM SHIP: THE UNCHARTED HISTORY OF ESCAPING SLAVERY BY SEA here

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. His “histories from below,” including The Slave Ship: A Human History, have won numerous awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, and have been translated into nineteen languages worldwide. He has produced a film, Ghosts of Amistad, with director Tony Buba, and written a play, The Return of Benjamin Lay, with playwright Naomi Wallace. His new book, “Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea,” will be published by Viking-Penguin May 2025.

Nadia Nurhussein is Professor in English and Africana Studies, specializing in African American literature and culture. She is the author of Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry (The Ohio State University Press, 2013)​, and editor of a new edition of The Pedro Gorino by Harry Foster Dean and Sterling North (Broadview, 2024).

Prior to arriving at Johns Hopkins, Prof. Nurhussein taught in the English departments at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, from 2005 to 2016 and at Mount Holyoke College from 2004 to 2005. In 2004, she earned her PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Harris Feinsod is a literary and cultural historian of the United States, Latin America, and the Atlantic world. His teaching and research encompass poetry, modernism and the avant-garde in Europe and the hemispheric Americas, and transnational studies. His recent work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of oceans, coasts, and working waterfronts under conditions of globalization and environmental instability. He earned a Ph.D. from Stanford (2011) and an A.B. from Brown (2004), both in Comparative Literature.

Feinsod’s first book, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford, hardcover 2017/paperback 2019), offers a detailed literary history of relations among poets in the US and Latin America amidst the political transformations of the mid-twentieth century. He is now at work on “Into Steam: The Worlds of Modernism at Sea.” A global account of transoceanic and dockside poetry, narrative fiction, visual art, and radical history in the early twentieth century, “Into Steam” charts modernist culture as viewed from its industrializing seaways. These projects were supported by fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center, and the National Humanities Center.

Feinsod’s essays appear in popular and scholarly venues such as American Literary History, The Baffler, In These Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modernism/modernity, n+1 and Post45. He also collaborates on translations and large-scale editorial projects. He is the co-translator (with Rachel Galvin), of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poems (Open Letter, 2018), which was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry. He directs Open Door Archive, a digital platform featuring reissues of neglected print cultures of the Americas. Previously, he served as assistant editor for The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition (2012). With Leah Feldman and Peter Kalliney, he is co-editing a global anthology of anticolonial thought. He is currently elected Chair of Publications on the American Comparative Literature Association Board of Directors.

Before coming to Hopkins, Feinsod spent over a decade at Northwestern University, where he held appointments and affiliations in English, Comparative Literature, Spanish and Portuguese, and Environment, Policy and Culture. Dedicated to research mentorship, he has served on more than 25 PhD dissertation committees.

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