Out of Breath, with Jim Downs, 4/24

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Out of Breath

Slavery, Ventilation and the Emergence of Epidemiology

A Tufts University Lecture by Dr. Jim Downs, in conversation with 
Dr. Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, Dr. Kerri Greenidge, and Dr. Kendra Field  
 

Moderated by Kyera Singleton, Exec. Director, Royall House and Slave Quarters

Wednesday, April 24th, 2024, 6:30-8:00pm

Royall House and Slave Quarters

Join Tufts’ Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and the Tufts Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice for a lecture and conversation on slavery, its legacies, and the medical humanities.  This special event will take place at Medford’s historic Royall House and Slave Quarters, the only standing slave quarters in the Northern United States. Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Jim Downs, author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine and Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction.  A deeply interdisciplinary scholar of race, gender, slavery, epidemiology, climate, and the history of medicine, Downs has advised Tufts’ new initiative on Slavery, Colonialism, and their Legacies at Tufts. As the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College, Dr. Downs’ work has been published and discussed in Science, Nature, and The Lancet. Downs will be joined in conversation by Tufts scholars Dr. Ndidiamakah Amutah-Onukhaga, Dr. Kerri Greenidge and Dr. Kendra Field, and hosted by RHSQ Executive Director Kyera Singleton.

Biographies

Jim Downs

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History. He is the author of Sick From Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2012), Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016) and Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (Harvard UP, 2021) which has been translated into Chinese, French, Korean, Japanese, and Russian. He has edited several anthologies, including Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation, coedited with David Blight (University of Georgia Press, 2017) and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2016) coedited with Jennifer Brier and Jennifer Morgan.

Downs is the co-series editor of History in the Headlines, at the University of Georgia Press, and published Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections, which grew out of a conversation he moderated with Stacey Abrams, Carol Anderson, Kevin M. Kruse, Heather Cox Richardson and Heather Ann Thompson He recently edited January 6th and the Politics of History, which is conversation he moderated with Joanne B. Freeman, Elizabeth Hinton, Jill Lepore, Stephanie McCurry, William Sturkey and Julian E. Zelizer

He has published articles and essays in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Slate, Vice, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education,  The L.A. Review of Books, among others. Downs has published book chapters in number of edited volumes, most recently in Remembering the Memphis Massacre: An American Story (UGA Press, 2020). Downs is Editor of Civil War History. He was awarded the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African and African American History at Harvard University in 2022-23. In 2022, he received a NEH grant to direct a summer institute, Civil War Archives: A New Social and Culture History, for faculty in higher education at Gettysburg College. 

In 2023, Downs was elected to was elected to the Society for American Historians in the US, the Royal Historical Society in the UK and to the Executive Council of the Southern Historical Association.  He earned his PhD in History at Columbia University, his MA in American Studies also at Columbia University, and his BA in American Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. The Organization of American Historians named him a Distinguished Lecturer in 2014-17, which was then renewed in 2017 and again in 2020 and 2023.  In 2015-16, Downs was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship that allowed him to return to graduate school where he gained postgraduate training in medical anthropology and global health at Harvard University.

Kerri Greenidge

Dr. Kerri Greenidge is Associate Professor in History, and in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she also co-directs the African American Trail Project and Tufts’ Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies Project. Greenidge is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (2019). The book received the Mark Lynton Prize in History, the Massachusetts Book Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Award, the Sperber Award from Fordham University, and the Peter J. Gomes Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society.  Her most recent book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family (2022) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the J. Anthony Lukas Award.  The Grimkes was a semi-finalist for the 2023 MAAH Stone Book Award, a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Award from the Schomburg Library, and the recipient of the 2023 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association.  As a public historian, Greenidge serves on the historians’ council for 10 Million Names, as historical advisor for the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket, and as researcher for Mayor Wu’s initiative on the history and legacy of slavery in Boston. Her writings have appeared in the New York Times, Massachusetts Historical Review, the Radical History Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Guardian.

Kendra Field

Dr. Kendra Taira Field is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. Field is the author of Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War (Yale, 2018). Her current book project, The Stories We Tell (W.W. Norton), is a history of African American genealogy and storytelling from the Middle Passage to the present, and winner of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. She is co-author, with Dr. Kerri Greenidge, of the forthcoming Black Atlas (W.W. Norton). Field abridged David Levering Lewis’ W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (Henry Holt, 2009), and her scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of African American History, Southern Cultures, and the American Historical Review. Field has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others, and is the recipient of the 2022 NAACP W.E.B. Du Bois Award. As a public historian, Field co-founded the Boston-based African American Trail Project and the Du Bois Forum, a retreat for writers, scholars, and artists; served as project historian for the Du Bois Freedom Center; co-curated “We Who Believe In Freedom,” the inaugural exhibition of the National Women’s History Museum (2023-24); and serves as researcher for Mayor Wu’s initiative on the history and legacy of slavery in Boston; and chief historian for the 10 Million Names Project of the New England Historical Genealogical Society.  Field received her Ph.D. in American History from New York University. She also holds a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. from Williams College. Before entering the academy, she worked in education and the non-profit sector in Boston and New York.

Kyera Singleton

Kyera Singleton is the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters. She is also a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in the Department of American Culture. For the 2021-2022 academic year, Kyera Singleton is an American Democracy Fellow, in the Charles Warren Center, at Harvard University. She has held prestigious academic fellowships from the Beinecke Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW). From 2018 through 2019, Kyera served as the Humanity in Action Policy Fellow for the ACLU of Georgia. As a policy fellow, she focused on mass incarceration, reproductive justice, and voting rights. She created the ACLU-GA’s first podcast series “Examining Justice” in order to highlight the voices of both community activists and policy makers in the fight for racial, gender, and transformative justice. As a public history scholar, Kyera recently served as an advisor on the Boston Art Commission’s Recontextualization Subcommittee for the bronze Emancipation Group Statue. She is also a member of the Board of Public Humanities Fellows at Brown University, which brings together a collection of museum leaders from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.  Singleton serves as researcher for Mayor Wu’s initiative on the history and legacy of slavery in Boston.