Harvard historian to deliver Munday lecture

Vincent Brown, the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, will deliver this year’s Reuben A. and Cheryl Casselberry Munday Distinguished Lecture April 17.

Brown’s talk, "Black History's Warning to the World," will take place from 5-6:30 p.m. April 17 in Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium of Klarman Hall. A reception will follow. Both events are free and open to the public.

Brown will talk about transatlantic efforts in the past several years to deny and disparage Black perspectives on history. Reframing narratives of the Age of Revolution, his lecture will highlight the ways in which Black history is world history, and as such has lessons — and warnings — for the world.

“ Vincent Brown is well positioned and qualified to engage this topic of Black history’s role given his extensive scholarship on the subject and the timeliness of this issue,” said Carole Boyce-Davies, Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English in the College of Arts & Sciences. “African American Studies is threatened at the state level by some governors who want to erase the contributions of one of the longest resident U.S. communities  in the United States, here even before 1619 date.”

Brown has published two prize-winning books about the history of slavery:  “The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery” and “Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War.” The author of numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he is also principal investigator and curator for the animated thematic map “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative” and was producer and director of research for the award-wining television documentary “Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness,” broadcast on PBS. His company Timestamp Media explores the history that connects people and places across the world. 

In 2014, Reuben ’69, MPS ’74 and Cheryl ’72 Munday established an endowment for an annual distinguished lecture at Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center. Their lecture series enables the department to bring leading scholars of African and African-American studies — or otherwise distinguished African-Americans — to campus every year.

Reuben Munday is chairman emeritus of the law firm Lewis & Munday P.C. in Detroit, a life member of Cornell University Council and a past member of its administrative board. Cheryl Munday is professor of psychology at the University of Detroit Mercy where she is faculty in masters of community development in its School of Architecture.