Event

Join Penn Professor Kathleen M. Brown in a discussion about her new book, Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race and Rights in the Age of Abolition. The book takes a fresh look at the campaign to end slavery and highlights how abolitionists, Black as well as white, put embodied forms of liberty at the center of the struggle. Professor Brown takes abolitionist language seriously, not just as an effort to stir white empathy, but as a focus on the physical body as the basis for universal humanity and rights claims. Her argument about embodied self-sovereignty has implications for present day struggles over incarceration, police violence, and abortion. Three copies of the books will be raffled at the end of the talk.

Co-sponsored by Penn Press.

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Kathleen M. Brown is the David Boies Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies, the History and Sociology of Science, and the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and the lead faculty historian on the Penn & Slavery Project. In 2021-2022 she was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, United Kingdom. Her scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.

Explore the world virtually, both far and near, with Penn faculty members and your fellow alumni community. Each live, interactive lecture in the Global Discovery Series features Penn professors sharing new and innovative research on a variety of topics. Participants will have the opportunity to ask in-depth questions and are sure to learn something new in each one-hour session.