CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Ira Berlin, a historian and the Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, has been named a Mellon Distinguished Senior Fellow for the spring semester at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He will be in residence on the Urbana campus from March 29 to April 11, and will have an office in the history department.
While in residence, Berlin will give a talk on “Rethinking Slavery: 1800-1861.” The talk, which is free and open to the public, begins at 3:30 p.m. on April 9 (Friday) in 213 Gregory Hall, 810 S. Wright St., Urbana.
Berlin’s talk is the keynote address for an April 10 (Saturday) invitation-only conference on campus titled “Transforming Slavery.” The scholarly conference, which also is funded by a Mellon grant, is being convened to “enhance research about slavery in the 19th century United States,” said Elizabeth Pleck, a U. of I. professor of history.
Berlin also will teach a U.S. history survey course while on campus and meet with a small seminar on slavery and the American Revolution.
In addition, Berlin will be a guest on WILL-AM (580) at 11 a.m. on April 8 (Thursday); during that interview he plans to talk about his research on North American slavery.
Berlin has devoted his scholarly career to developing analytical frameworks for the study of North American slavery and bringing to light the full documentary record of the slave experience in peacetime and war, Pleck said.
His first book, “Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South” (1975), won the First Book Prize of the National Historical Society. “Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America” (1998) won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize as the best book in American history.
His latest book, published last year, is “Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.” Pleck said it “breaks new ground in emphasizing the forced relocation of slaves, especially young slaves from cotton and sugar plantations, to frontier settlements in the lower South and the Southwest.”
In 1991 the Maryland Association for Higher Education named Berlin the state’s Outstanding Educator. In 2002 President Bill Clinton appointed him to the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. That same year Berlin served as president of the Organization of American Historians.
He is chair of the council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, a joint project of the College of William and Mary and Colonial Williamsburg. Berlin is completing his 2003-2004 Guggenheim Fellowship to study movement and place in African-American life, 1650-2000.
Berlin’s visit and events are sponsored by the Afro-American Studies and Research Program, the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, the department of history, the department of human and community development and the Mellon Initiative.
In early 2003, the U. of I. announced that it had received a Mellon Foundation Grant to fund a Mellon Faculty Fellows Program to transform teaching and research in the humanities. The four-year $1.25 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation focuses on four units: anthropology, comparative and world literature, English and history.
Under the terms of the grant and initiative, 10 faculty fellows and eight junior postdoctoral fellows are to be named, senior fellows from outside the institution are to be brought to campus, and six “state-of-the-art” conferences are to be held, each of them spotlighting a senior fellow, “a scholar of singular importance to current development associated with the topic or area.”
More information about Berlin can be found at the Center on Democracy’s Web site, or by contacting Pleck.
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