Reflections from Akeia de Barros Gomes, Ph.D., Steven Lubar, and Christina Young ’26 A.M.

Reflections from Zawdie Sandvliet and Ningxin Gao.

This research cluster explores the history and persistence of structural racism in biomedicine as it intersects with economic and social conditions. The cluster focuses on reimagining the knowledge we produce about race and health from a social justice perspective.

This endeavor to “follow the money” investigates the technologies of finance that facilitated the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Atlantic plantation complex by developing new perspectives on the financial mechanics of slaving operations and the trade’s relationship to maritime insurance, commodity brokerage, currency arbitrage, banking, and other elements of the financial services industry.

The Simmons Center facilitates a year-long reading group which focuses on historical and contemporary issues of imprisonment, incarceration, captivity, criminalization, and policing. The reading group is a collaboration between various sectors of the Providence community and the Center.

Reflections from Arman Deendar ’25, Shravya Sompalli ’25, Melaine Ferdinand-King ’25 Ph.D. in Africana Studies, Kevin Carter ’25, Nélari Figueroa Torres ’2, 5Laurie Tamayo ’25, and Dillon Stone ’25

Professor Bogues reflects on the year 2025 within its relations to the Simmons Center highlighting two major achievements including the co-curated exhibition, “In Slavery’s Wake: The Making of Black Freedom” and a revitalized MA in Public Humanities at Brown.

Roberto Lugo plates donated to the Simmons Center adding to a robust display of works the Center has acquired over the years.

This community-based project, housed at Brown University, is a collaborative effort to build a database of enslaved Indigenous people throughout time all across the Americas in order to promote greater understanding of the historical circumstances and ongoing trauma of settler colonialism.

Join us in celebrating the Simmons Center’s first graduating cohort of Public Humanities Students: Florence Blackwell, Claire Inouye, Christina Young and Ray Zhang.

This episode of the “Intention to Treat” podcast features the late Lundy Braun, a professor emerita of medical science and Africana studies, who was interviewed about health disparities before her death in 2024. Lundy was the founding Research Cluster Faculty Fellow for the Race, Medicine, and Social Justice Research Cluster at the Simmons Center.

Mass Incarceration and Punishment in America Research Cluster Faculty Fellow Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve writes that wrongful convictions stem from something more pernicious than shoddy law enforcement in her new book "Crime Fictions." She discussed her findings on false confessions' impact on wrongful convictions in a recent interview with WBEZ.

Linford Fisher, Associate Professor of History and principal researcher for Stolen Relations – a digital archive of hundreds of stories about Indigenous enslavement, servitude, and resilience – recently published a book, Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History. The book begins in 1492 with Christopher Columbus and ends in 1978, following the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act, illuminating the heavy history of Indigenous populations in America.

Following the Brown University Exhibition of Innocent Knowledge, one of the project's co-founders, Taher Vahanvaty, helped his cousin, Taha Vahanvaty, bring the project to his school, American University, through the Project on Civic Dialogue of their School of Public Affairs. The PCD hosted open exhibitions as well as dialogue sessions in which small groups could discuss children's innocence in correlation to the Innocent Knowledge Project, a showcase of children's experiences in different regions across Israel and Palestine.

Prof. Augusto’s research and teaching interests include subjugated knowledges, global Black radicalism, colonial sciences, higher ed. transformation and visual arts. Her most recent work spans Brazil, the U.S., and South Africa. She insists that the study of slavery and its afterlives should be an international, interdisciplinary, multilingual endeavor, and that knowledge is enhanced when our work keeps this in mind.