UMBC's Social Sciences Forum presents the Low Lecture, a discussion on Slavery, Warfare, and Rebellion in the Caribbean between Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University, and Marjoleine Kars, Associate Professor of History, UMBC. The conversation will be moderated by Sharika Crawford, Associate Professor of History, U.S. Naval Academy.

Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies. He directs Harvard University’s History Design Studio and teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery in the Americas. Brown is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008), producer of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, an audiovisual documentary broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and is most recently the author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020).

Marjoleine Kars teaches courses in Early American history, Atlantic history, and women’s history at UMBC. She is an affiliate faculty member in Gender and Women’s Studies and Language, and Culture (LLC). She served as chair of the history department from 2011–2018, and is senior editor for International Labor and Working Class History. Her new book about a massive and nearly successful slave rebellion in a Dutch colony (now the Republic of Guyana) on the Caribbean coast of South America, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast was published by The New Press in August 2020, and came out in a Dutch translation by Atlas Contact in January 2021. NPR included Blood on the River on its “Best Books for 2020″ list.

Sharika Crawford is a historian of Latin America. Her research has focused on Colombia, circum-Caribbean migration, maritime borderlands, and the experience of Afro-Latin Americans. She has published her work in venues such as Historia Critica, the New West Indian Guide, International Journal of Maritime History, and Global South. Her current book project The Last Turtlemen: Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Crossing in the Maritime Caribbean is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.