Islam, Slavery, and the American South Conference Keynote

The Islam, Slavery, and the American South Conference is hosted by Duke and UNC and will bring scholars, students, and community leaders together to highlight the intersection between Islam, slavery, and the American South. Towards the end of the conference, there will be updates on the Omar ibn Said book project as well as the launch of a collection of writings of Muslims enslaved in the Americas, hosted in the Carolina Digital Repository at UNC Library. Dr. Paul Lovejoy will open the conference with a talk titled "The Biographical Accounts of Enslaved Muslims in the Americas."

Paul E. Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of History, York University, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is Chair of the Board of Directors fr Walk With Web Inc. (www.walkwithweb.org) and was the Founding Director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University, and held the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History (2000-2015). He is a past member of the UNESCO "Slave Route" Project: Resistance, Liberty, Heritage (1996-2012), with which he continues to be associated. He has published more than forty books, including Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (1775-1850) (2016), Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa (2019), and most recently Slavery, Resistance and Abolitions: A Pluralist Perspective (2019) with Ali Moussa Iye and Nelly Schmidt and The Atlantic and Africa: The Second Slavery and Beyond (2021), co-edited with Dale Tomich. He is editor of Life Stories and Freedom Narratives of Global Africa, UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. 10, and is General Editor of The Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora (Africa World Press), which has published 35 volumes. He was co-editor of the journal, African Economic History for two decades until 2021. A special issue of African Economic History was published in his honor in 2021 (Vol. 49. No. 1). He has received numerous grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, currently holding multiple year awards for "Testimonies of Enslavement," which has as its website and portal www.freedomnarratives.org and "Islamic Terrorism in Africa" (www.iptsa.org). Most recently he was awarded a grant from the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Innovation on Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (www.datasproject.org).