This past semester, as part of the Simmons Center’s Community Engagement Initiative and K–12 focus, we hosted Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM) in Norwood House as they held their annual fall training series. This year’s series was called Liberation 101 and was led by Suonriaksmay Keo (she/her/hers), the Youth Engagement Director of PrYSM.

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.

As part of the Simmons Center’s 10th anniversary, the Marian Anderson String Quartet returned to campus with "On Being Enslaved"—a powerful recital tracing the journey from auction block to concert stage, uniting music with memory, resistance, and healing.

“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)

The Cluster hosted Dr. Michael Walker for a talk on his book, "Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail", exploring incarceration’s toll. Students archived letters, testified for reform, and amplified voices of those impacted by prison.

In a joint project with the International Institute of Social History, the Cluster unites scholars from across continents. Since 2021, the group has met in Amsterdam and Jamaica to examine racial capitalism, colonial rule, and slavery’s lasting impact, fostering global discussions on these interconnected histories.

The Stolen Relations project, launched in 2015 at Brown University, seeks to recover and reinterpret the often hidden histories of Indigenous slavery, offering a fresh perspective on the colonial past and its lasting impact.

In 2023, the HTRC celebrated the launch of "White Supremacy, Racism, and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking", an anthology exploring how anti-trafficking efforts are rooted in systemic racism and colonial power structures. The cluster also premiered "Fly in Power", a documentary on Asian migrant massage workers, highlighting labor exploitation and racial justice.

As part of the Simmons Center’s 10th Anniversary series, writer and ritual performance artist Cherise Morris ’16 returned to Brown for the premiere of the cosmic matter of Black lives. Through poetry, prayer, and ancestral wisdom, Morris invited audiences into a ritual performance exploring diasporic healing, ecological harmony, and racial justice.

In 2022–2023, Allyson LaForge, supported by the Simmons Center, led key efforts to inventory 10,000 cultural Belongings at the Tomaquag Museum. She helped adapt the museum’s cataloging system to reflect Indigenous knowledge systems, laying the groundwork for a major move and future use of Traditional Knowledge Labels.

To mark its 10th anniversary, the Center presented 'Racial Slavery, Marronage, and Freedom', a retrospective featuring Edouard Duval-Carrié, Jess Hill, and Rénold Laurent. Each artist, a longtime collaborator of the Center, debuted new work exploring resistance, memory, and the legacy of slavery through bold, layered visual storytelling and reflection.

In 2022–2023, the Carceral State Reading Group deepened its study of political imprisonment, focusing on Brown’s acquisition of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s papers. Members attended conferences, built relationships with activists, and collaborated with student and community groups on campaigns like Stop Cop City.

In 2022–2023, Decolonization at Brown (DAB) underwent vital restructuring to ensure sustainability, refocusing efforts and recruiting new members. Despite mid-year challenges, DAB hosted key events, including a screening of "What is this Place" and a discussion with Azad Essa on "Hostile Homelands".

Inspired in part by cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Unfinished Conversations (UC) is a new form of curatorial practice, public engagement, and programming to collect, give voice to, and provide a platform for untold histories, memories, and narratives related to the history of racialized slavery and its afterlives.

In 2022–2023, (De)Cypher: Black Notes on Culture and Criticism explored Black culture through study groups and conversations with working-class artists. The journal refined its methodology, culminating in a forthcoming edition, and hosted Cyphering While Black, a multimedia series featuring live discussions with independent hip-hop artists.

In 'Speculative Ecologies The Intimate Bond of Freedom and Green', Renée Elizabeth Neely-TANNER creates layered, intuitive landscapes inspired by the Maroon communities of the Dismal Swamp. Drawing on memory, history, and place, each painting becomes a map of liberation—spiritual, emotional, and ancestral—guided by color, texture, and care.

Through interviews with five Latinx and Caribbean restaurant owners in Providence, Serving a Plate Back Home explores how food, memory, and migration intersect. This photo-based exhibition highlights restaurants as sites of storytelling, cultural identity, and transnational connection. Each dish served carries history, home, and heart.

The Symbolic Slave Garden Student Caretaker Group is restoring and reimagining the garden as a living archive of Black land stewardship. Through historical research, hands-on gardening, and collaboration with other heritage gardens, students honor the resilience, knowledge, and cultural legacies of enslaved Africans.

The Cluster's Slavery, Democracy, and Racial Violence in the Americas workshop united scholars and activists to examine colonialism’s legacy in shaping racial violence, linking slavery’s history to modern issues like police brutality and mass incarceration.

The struggles of those who survive epidemics do not end when they leave the hospital, said Adia Benton ’99, an associate professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.

At a talk hosted by the Simmons Center Tuesday, Benton discussed her experiences with survivors of the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone — specifically, how the deadly disease brought the survivors new problems.

Doctors on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis describe an unprecedented health emergency that has exposed the societal wounds among the poor and people of color that have persisted for centuries.

"Consumer and corporate-focused approaches to labour exploitation and trafficking are ineffective," writes Dr. Elena Shih.

Instead, universities have taken the lead on what they call reparative justice. Georgetown University apologized to descendants of slaves who were sold to pay school debts and recently pledged to raise $400,000 a year for programs to help those descendants. In October, Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey announced a nearly $28 million plan, including scholarships to descendants of enslaved Africans.

For a scholar of public health like Professor Ronald Aubert, the work of the interdisciplinary CSSJ Race, Medicine, and Social Justice Research Cluster is of critical importance. The research cluster is conducting desperately needed research in the fields of public health,  probing how racism pervades medicine and how the racialization of medical “evidence” that guides clinical practice has largely been ignored.

“At our core, we believe that human trafficking and labor exploitation are driven by a system of racialized global inequality, exacerbated by unequal development and excessively punitive policy that often govern border control,” explains Professor Elena Shih, the Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies and faculty leader of the CSSJ’s Human Trafficking Research Cluster.

On the 400th anniversary of the start of slave trade in the British American colonies, students and faculty at Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice are engaging in research for a PBS miniseries directed by renowned documentarian Stanley Nelson, hosting a two-day symposium on the lasting effects of slavery and more.

“This is a different way of learning and engaging in history,” notes Professor Zach Sell of the work of the Atlantic Slave Trade Research Cluster. Since 2017, the Simmons Center has been engaged in an ongoing collaboration with Firelight Media to produce a groundbreaking, multi-part documentary series entitled Creating the New World: The Transatlantic Slave Trade.

More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.

For Rutgers University PhD Candidate Kelsey Lizotte, reparations are about far more than a monetary exchange.

Beginning next Wednesday, Dartmouth will host a two-day lecture series as part of a conference titled “Reflections on the Afterlives of 1969.”

Although the destination has a reputation for being a bit melanin deficient, the historical presence of Black people in one of the first and pivotal slave states, is loaded with the contributions of the enslaved Africans that literally built the city of Providence and subsequently its textile industry.

Immediately upon opening its doors in 2012, Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) launched a rich yearlong series of programs that asked critical questions about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, its legacies and ramifications for the present.

Anthony Bogues, a professor at Brown University who studies the history and consequences of slavery, said American society is caught between countervailing forces: an increase in overt racism, including recent racist tweets from US President Donald Trump, on the one side, and greater efforts to come to terms with the nation's history of racism and legacy of slavery on the other.

An exhbition of photos and stories from six Providence families of African descent shows how immigration changes home cooking traditions.

CSSJ exhibition Liquid Knowledges is featured in Biscayne Times. The exhibition includes work by Haitian artist Eduoard Duval-Carrié, who will be participating in a workshop with the CSSJ later in April.

Elena Shih is interviewed by Thomas Thurston about her work on human trafficking rescue efforts and the politics of labor, gender, and sexuality on last week's Slavery and It's Legacies podcast, out of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University.

The Providence City Council has passed a resolution in support of an effort to memorialize the city’s role in the slave trade. 

Initiative creates awareness of Rhode Island’s historic role in slavery

Global Slavery and Exhibitionary Impulse was de titel van een symposium (11/12 juni 2015) waar ik een presentatie gaf over de manier waarop het Amsterdam Museum in 2013 slavernij toonde als interventie in de Gouden Eeuw tentoonstelling. Hoe vertaal je exhibitionary impulse? Als het tentoonstellen van slavernij of misschien eerder de neiging tot het tentoonstellen?

Rhode Island’s Episcopal Church is about to unveil plans for a museum and teaching center dedicated to the slave trade. The state has a long and difficult history of involvement  in slavery.  RIPR political analyst Scott MacKay discussed the proposal with Episcopal Bishop Nicholas Knisely, whose wife happens to work for Rhode Island Public Radio.