Faculty
Sean Griffin
BA, The City College of New York. MA, PhD, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Griffin’s research interests lie at the intersection of race and class in Early America and the Atlantic World, and encompass political, social, economic, intellectual, and labor history. His first book, The Root and the Branch: Working-Class Reform and Antislavery, 1790–1860, explores the complex and contradictory nature of the relationship between two of Early America’s most important social movements. His work has also appeared in a special volume of The Journal of the Civil War Era on abolitionism, and in various online publications. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including an NEH Long-term Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Program in Early American Economy and Society fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. He has also contributed to public history exhibitions at the Center for Brooklyn History. SLC, 2026–
Undergraduate Courses 2026-2027
History
-
Open, Seminar—Spring
HIST 3113
Despite a growing awareness of the ways that slavery and its legacies continue to shape contemporary forms of inequality, slavery seems like an aberration from our twenty-first century perspective. Yet for much of the last 500 years, enslaved labor was broadly accepted and widely deployed throughout the Atlantic World. While it is clear that New World slavery grew and expanded simultaneously with the rise of democratic politics, independent nation-states, and capitalist economic systems in the West, slavery’s role in shaping these developments continues to be a matter of controversy and debate. This course will offer a comparative analysis of slavery and antislavery in the development of political institutions and ideologies in the Early Modern Atlantic World, while examining slavery’s links to empire, commerce, and capitalism in the Atlantic basin and beyond. While our primary focus will be on the United States and the colonies of British North America, this course will compare the rise and spread of slavery and antislavery in these regions with related developments in Brazil, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Throughout the semester, we will examine how slavery and the various forms of resistance to it impacted revolutions, independence movements, civil wars, and the formation of the modern nation states and political ideologies that we are familiar with today.
Faculty
-
Open, Seminar—Fall
HIST 3041
Between the 16th and 20th centuries, the Atlantic Ocean served as an important conduit linking the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora to North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe—not only as forced migrants in the Atlantic Slave Trade, but as sailors, maritime workers, political radicals, abolitionists, intellectuals, and pan-Africanists, among others. This course will introduce students to the history of the Black Atlantic—an approach to conceptualizing the history of the African diaspora by focusing on the movement and migration of African and African-descended peoples between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Although histories of enslavement are central to understanding the African diaspora in the Early Modern period, this course will give equal weight to abolitionism and related forms of resistance to enslavement and oppression. Just as importantly, we will explore the ways that African-descended peoples helped to shape many of the key ideological, political, and cultural developments in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean between the 16th and early 20th centuries. By focusing on certain key figures within the Black Atlantic tradition—including Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Robert Wedderburn, Sarah and Charles Remond, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and W.E.B. DuBois—we will attempt to recover a vibrant but marginalized history of radical Black thought, politics, activism, and culture.
Faculty
-
Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring
HIST 3104
The year 1968—a year which saw the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the passage of a landmark civil rights act, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy—looms large in American historiography and public memory as a symbolic inflection point. But 1968 was also a highly consequential year in global history, one with world-changing and epoch-defining significance for the broader confrontations of the Cold War, the political and economic fortunes of the developing world, and the emergence of globalized cultures and countercultures. This course will examine the global history of the postwar period through the lens of 1968, drawing from one or more of the major events of each month of that year to explore such themes as anticolonial and revolutionary struggles, youth culture and political movements, the Cold War, the rise of second-wave feminism, and the conservative backlash to postwar liberalism. Along the way, we will analyze and discuss the significance of such events as May ‘68 in France, the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico, the Vietnam War, the Pan-Africanist and Non-Aligned movements, and the Cultural Revolution in China. Ultimately, we will consider the success and failures of these movements and their legacies, while critically reevaluating the global significance of the 1960s as a whole.
Faculty