For the 2021-2022 academic year, the Center’s work is organized around the following research clusters:
Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
Research Clusters
Led by Simmons Center Faculty Fellows, research clusters examine the legacies of racial slavery through scholarship and public engagement. The clusters encourage new scholarship and critical debates to create forms of knowledge which intervene in the world.
This project explores contemporary forms of human bondage and engages in public programming around this issue.
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.
This cluster explores the history and persistence of structural racism in biomedicine as it intersects with economic and social conditions. We focus on reimagining the knowledge we produce about race and health from a social justice perspective.
This new research cluster explores the way that race, slavery, and colonialism have shaped global capitalism. This is a three year project that is co-led by he Simmons Center and the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).
The making of the modern world was in part constituted by the historical injustices of colonialism and racial slavery, a joint project between the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
This research cluster seeks to examine punishment and the U.S. carceral state through an interdisciplinary lens. The cluster operates from the frame that race and anti-Black racism are cornerstones to understanding the vast leviathan of punishment in America.
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.