Professor and Director of the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice

About this position

Brown University seeks to recruit an outstanding scholar (tenurable at the rank of Professor) to lead the campus’s signature academic center at the intersection of history, public memory, and restorative justice. We seek candidates from across the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts who are committed to connecting the transatlantic slave trade, its many legacies, and its broadest diasporic experiences to present-day questions of civic inclusion, cultural identity and collective memory, public policy, and justice. The successful candidate must be able to be appointed as a full professor with tenure in a tenuring department at Brown, and will be appointed to a five-year renewable term as Director of the Simmons Center. Background In 2003, President Ruth J. Simmons charged a campus committee to investigate the university’s historic relationship the transatlantic slave trade. The resulting “Slavery & Justice Report” offered a model for institutional self-study now widely emulated by colleges and universities across North America and Europe. The report (now available in a digital second edition ) called for a new research center to focus on “slavery and other forms of historic and contemporary injustice, movements to promote human rights, and struggles over the meaning of individual and institutional responsibility.” Launched in 2012–13, the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice was renamed in honor of President Simmons in 2023. The Center sustains a range of faculty-led research initiatives; hosts postdoctoral and visiting fellows; undertakes programming intended for both scholarly and public audiences; collaborates with museums and other cultural institutions across the globe; offers dedicated gallery space to support artistic engagement with slavery and its afterlives; undertakes educational initiatives for K-12 students in Rhode Island and beyond; and has increasingly turned its attention to the histories of slavery and colonialism in New England includi

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