Speaker

Christy Clark-Pujara

Professor of African American Studies

Christy Clark-Pujara, Ph.D., is a historian whose research focuses on the experiences of Black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examined — small towns and cities in the North and Midwest. She contends that the full dimensions of the African American and American experience cannot be appreciated without reference to how Black people managed their lives in places where they were few. An absence of a large Black populace did not mean that ideas of blackness were not central to these places’ social, political, and economic development. Her first book, “Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island,” examines how the business of slavery — economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods — shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War.