The Simmons Center is excited to welcome our first cohort of Public Humanities MA Students to campus in the fall of 2024. This cohort is expected to graduate in 2026.

The Newport Historical Society (NHS) announced a $4.5 million capital campaign to restore Newport’s oldest colonial home and convert it to a museum de­voted to the region’s Black history. At an unveiling of plans for the 1697 Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House, NHS board President Douglas Newhouse hailed the conversion as a project to share the history of African Americans in Newport that has gone untold for the most part. “No other place in New England or perhaps the whole country will tell this history the way we will here at this house,” he said as he made note of Newport being a hub of the slave trade from colo­nial times to the early 19th century.

Akeia de Barros Gomes, Simmons Center Adjunct Lecturer in Slavery and Justice, grew up in Newport and attended the city’s public schools. She said she is pleased that generations of ad­vocates would have their efforts rewarded with the conversion of the house to a museum of Black history. A member of the NHS board, Gomes has consulted on the Wan­ton Lyman-Hazard House project.

SOAS University of London will award honorary degrees to six distinguished individuals at this year’s graduation ceremonies.

Professor Anthony Bogues will be awarded a Doctor of Literature (DLit) (honoris causa) in recognition of his substantial contribution to the studies of African and African diaspora political theory, African and Caribbean politics; Global South development issues; Caribbean Art; political economy of race, and slavery and the history of capitalism. The award also acknowledges his significant work as founder and Director of the Simmons Center.

Around 200 years ago, the area near the Rhode Island State House and the train station was home to a working-class neighborhood called Snowtown. It’s largely forgotten today, but a team of researchers is trying to change that. Globe RI’s Carlos Muñoz talks to two members of the Snowtown Project research team - Heather Olson and Traci Picard, Simmons Center Senior Research Assistant. They say they're aiming to "put those people back into the imagination, as real as people who matter."

“Wail on Whalers, a Portrait of Amos Haskins” by Felandus Thames, an “homage to escaped enslaved people who found autonomy in whaling,” is comprised of hairbeads strung on coated wire. The piece is part of the Mystic Seaport Museum's “Entwined” exhibition, which reimagines thousands of years of maritime history through Black and Indigenous worldviews and experiences.

"Entwined" is the culminating exhibition for the Reimagining New England Histories project organized by the Simmons Center at Brown University, Williams College, and Mystic Seaport Museum and generously funded by the Just Futures Initiative of the Mellon Foundation.

The Commemoration Lab, The Department of Art, Culture and Tourism (ACT,) and the Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS) are commissioning nine creative practitioners to interrogate the ways that Providence residents construct and share memory and culture. Simmons Center Senior Research Assistant, Traci Picard, has been chosen as Writer in Residence for this project.

The Atlantic Ocean connects indigenous people along the coast of what is now New England and those in the western African nations of Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Kalunga, in the Bantu language widespread across Africa. Kuhtah in Pequot.

The depths of these connections are explored at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, CT–Pequot land–during “Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea,” an exhibition breaking from the Museum’s tradition of telling maritime stories through a colonizer, shipbuilder, industrial, extractive perspective. Before starting any work, “Entwined” curator Akeia de Barros Gomes, Senior Curator of Maritime Social Histories at Mystic Seaport Museum and Simmons Center Visiting Scholar, assembled a committee of indigenous and African descended community members to discuss what they wanted to present and how.

"Entwined" is the culminating exhibition for the Reimagining New England Histories project organized by the Simmons Center at Brown University, Williams College, and Mystic Seaport Museum and generously funded by the Just Futures Initiative of the Mellon Foundation.

Indigenous and Black people tell their own seafaring stories at Mystic Seaport Museum.

"Entwined" is the culminating exhibition for the Reimagining New England Histories project organized by the Simmons Center at Brown University, Williams College, and Mystic Seaport Museum and generously funded by the Just Futures Initiative of the Mellon Foundation.

This spring, Sophia Janssens and her classmates added nearly 33,000 words and over 300 references to Wikipedia articles as part of Dr. Mack Scott’s course “This is America,” which focused on people and events often marginalized or forgotten in American history. During the weeks of the course alone, their collective work on Wikipedia was viewed 237,000 times.

Growth made Rhode Island’s capital city vibrant, but multicultural, working-class neighborhoods were sacrificed in the process. Traci Picard, a Simmons Center Walking Tour Guide, historian, and graduate of the JNBC Public Humanities program at Brown University is also a researcher for the project.

On Thursday, October 19th, 2023, UNESCO, in partnership with Brown University, The University of the West Indies, and Liberty Hall (Jamaica), had the pleasure of hosting a groundbreaking dialogue on Sports and Racism at Liberty Hall, in Kingston, Jamaica, within the framework of the 4th Convening of the Cost of Racism Project.

As the discussion unfolded, Michael Holding, the renowned Jamaican sportsman, cricketer, and social justice advocate, engaged in a compelling conversation with Professor Anthony Bogues, the Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, providing insight to the impact of racism on the life and careers of promising sportsmen and women and proposing how the issues of racism and discrimination could be overcome.

In the Martin Luther King Lecture on October 9, 2023, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Prof. Anthony Bogues called for taking as an example not the dreaming, but the radical Martin Luther King, and addressing the problems of our present time. ‘Action is what makes us stand out as human beings.’

Prof. Bogues is the inaugural director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice at Brown University and is a visiting professor of African and African diaspora thought at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Trailblazer Dr. Ruth J. Simmons, the namesake for Brown University's Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, sits down with TODAY's Jenna Bush Hager to talk about her new memoir “Up Home” in which she shares her journey from poverty in the segregated South to becoming the first Black president of an ivy league university.

The stage is set for a historic and controversial vote in the 35th Legislature today, during which lawmakers will consider whether to trade Whistling Cay to the National Park Service in exchange for a parcel of land in Estate Catherineberg for the purpose of building a public K-12 school on St. John. During that session, Hadiya Sewer, University of the Virgin Islands Scholar-In-Residence and Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, made a case for exploring other possibilities and referenced Malcolm X’s assertion that “land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice and equality.”

Arielle Julia Brown, 2015-2017 Public History of Slavery Graduate Fellow with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and founder and director of Black Spatial Relics, supports performance artists whose art contends with slavery, freedom and justice.

“There was a transnational flow of medical knowledge about how disease spread that increased between 1756 and 1866 and transpired not only at familiar hubs of medical research but also at sites of imperialism, slavery, war, and dispossession.” (Downs, Maladies of Empire, p. 5)