Book Launch Party with Leslie M. Alexander and J.T. Roane

Join us for a casual virtual book launch celebration with Professor Leslie M. Alexander and ISGRJ Named Term Chair Professor J.T. Roane on their newly released and forthcoming titles:

- Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States by Leslie M. Alexander (Dec. 2022, University of Illinois Press) and

- Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place by J.T. Roane (Jan. 2023, New York University Press)

About the Featured Speakers:

Leslie M. Alexander is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University and is a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. A specialist in early African American and African Diaspora history, she is the author of African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 and Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States. She is also the co-editor of three additional volumes, including Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining the Boundaries of Black Intellectual History. Her current project, “How We Got Here: Slavery and the Making of the Modern Police State,” examines how surveillance of free and enslaved Black communities in the colonial and antebellum eras laid the foundation for modern-day policing. A portion of that research appears in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.

J. T. Roane, a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, is a historian broadly concerned with matters of geography, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is at work on the manuscript, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia, which historicizes multiple modes of insurgent spatial assemblage Black communities articulated in Philadelphia in the second half of the twentieth century. He is the lead of the Black Ecologies Initiative and former co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society AAIHS). He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University.