The Center’s public humanities work is organized around the following projects:
Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
Public Humanities Projects
Public Humanities projects include gallery exhibitions, arts programming and the development of new high school curriculum. The Simmons Center has created partnerships with many museums, universities and film makers developing projects that are reshaping the way we understand racial slavery and its impact on our world today.
Active Public Humanities Projects
Visit us in our renovated 19th century house, which includes a gallery exhibition space, the stunning glass wall art piece Rising to Freedom, and a Symbolic Slave Garden.
This project is organized by the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice (CSSJ) at Brown University in partnership with Williams College and Mystic Seaport Museum. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the project aims to tell a different and more complete historical and contemporary understanding of the lives, contributions, and everyday experiences of Black and Indigenous people in New England.
This exhibition and curatorial project presents both the global interconnectedness of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade, as well as illuminates an alternative view about the history of our global modernity. Jointly led by the Simmons Center and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture.
"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. It is a collaborative project with museums and communities around the world.
This research and workshop project aims to support the development of a multi-part documentary series on the Atlantic slave trade. Creating a New World: The Transatlantic Slave Trade will chart the economic and human cost of the slave trade across the Atlantic basin, underscoring how this expansive system of trade, violence, and profit built the modern world.
Public Humanities Project Archive
This project creates an inventory of materials in Brown University Library's Special Collections related to slavery and abolition to help scholars more easily access these items.