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.

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.

Since March 20, the experiences of five Latinx and Caribbean restaurateurs in Providence have been featured in the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice along with the experiences of four other local restaurant owners. The common thread stringing the stories together: Each restaurant owner migrated to the United States with hopes of bringing a piece of their heritage along with them.

Titled “Serving a Plate Back Home: Migration Stories of Latinx and Caribbean Restauranteurs in Providence, R.I.,” the exhibition consists of an audio interview series and photo collection that “offers a glimpse into the personal journeys and intentions behind five restaurants that function as enclaves for Latinx and Caribbean communities in Providence,” according to the event’s website.

Design, art magazine celebrates South Asian culture, aims to erase barriers to knowledge.

When Brown University released its landmark 2006 report documenting the institution’s historical involvement in slavery, many of its recommendations were one-time fixes: revising the university’s official history, creating memorials, and the like. Some, however, required longer-term engagement, such as the creation of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), a research hub focusing on the history of slavery and its contemporary impacts.

‘Indefinite’ presents Walker’s sociological findings on sleep hygiene, role of racism in jail culture

Book discusses consent, politics, violence of Antebellum era New Orleans

The Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom project tells Black and Indigenous histories through publications, educational programming and exhibitions. Founded in 2021, the initiative is a grant-funded partnership between Williams College, Mystic Seaport Museum and the Brown Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and Prof. Anthony Bogues, Director of Brown University's Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), share about the Global Curatorial Project co-convened by the CSSJ and the Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The Global Curatorial Project, which grew out of conversations that came after a conference at the CSSJ, includes the "In Slavery's Wake" exhibition and book project as well as the "Unfinished Conversations" oral histories project.

Policing and criminalization of sex work hurts massage workers, even when they aren’t sex workers.

The shootings of Asian massage workers in Georgia this month have been framed as part of a surge of anti-Asian violence during the Covid-19 pandemic. But they’re also part of a longstanding problem: the violence against and the surveillance of migrant massage workers.

These women are vulnerable because of their race, their gender, their immigration status — and for the type of work they do. Asian massage parlors have long been a target of law enforcement and anti-trafficking organizations who see “illicit massage businesses” as loci of human trafficking.

Nearly all of these organizations have called for the increased surveillance and policing of massage businesses, and the result has been hundreds of raids across the country which have terrorized and criminalized massage workers. These systemic forms of violence cannot be divorced from the brutal killings of massage parlor workers in the Atlanta area on March 16.

A newly created research position is designed to shed light on some of the most deeply troubling elements of human history while exploring new ways of envisioning the future. Applications are currently being accepted for the two-year Historical Injustice and Democracy Postdoctoral Research Associate position, a joint project of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) and the Watson Institute—just one example of the growing relationship between the two, according to Edward Steinfeld, director of the Watson Institute.

Brown University, Williams College and the Mystic Seaport Museum scholars will use maritime history as a basis for studying the relationship between European colonization, dispossession of Native American land and racial slavery.

Annual Financial Report 2020
Like most institutions of higher education, Brown University faced enormous financial and operational challenges in Fiscal Year 2020 in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet despite the trying circumstances, Brown remains financially strong and fully committed to pursuing its ambitious plans for excellence.

The annual financial report offers an overview of the University’s financial statements, success in fundraising and investment performance. Covering Fiscal Year 2020, this year’s report highlights the ways in which the financial markets and growth of the economy created opportunities for excellent financial results for Brown, even in the midst of an unprecedented global health crisis.

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.