Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
History
University of California, Riverside
2000
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Faculty
Faculty
Frederick Knight, Ph.D.
Professor and Department Chair
Department/Office
- History
School/College
- College of Arts & Sciences
Biography
Frederick Knight, Ph.D. is an expert on early African American and African Diaspora history. He is the author of Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (Penn Press, 2024), which argues that elders were central to African American community formation through Reconstruction. The book also demonstrates how whites and blacks mobilized competing ideas about age to exercise power from the era of slavery through the period of emancipation in the United States. His first book Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010) traces how Africans, though carried across the Atlantic against their wills, drew upon knowledge from their homelands to shape the agricultural and material worlds of New World slave labor camps. He has published scholarly articles and book chapters on black history, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Negro History, the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, The History Transactions of Ghana, Early American Studies, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and The Conversation.
Professor Knight has held fellowships at the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University, and the University of California, Riverside, where he held the P. Sterling Stuckey Postdoctoral Fellowship in African-American history. He has recently been awarded short-term fellowships from the Virginia Museum of History and Culture and the Huntington Library, and he was also the recipient of an HBCU Faculty Research Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. In addition, he served in various capacities with scholarly organizations including Imagining America, the American Historical Association, and the Omohundro Institute.
Education & Expertise
Education
Master of Arts (M.A.)
History
University of California, Riverside
1994
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)
History
Morehouse College
1992
Accomplishments
Accomplishments
Virginia Museum of History and Culture Mellon Research Fellow, 2024-25
Huntington Library Short-Term Research Fellow, 2024-25
ACLS HBCU Faculty Research Grant, 2024-25
Visiting Professor, University of Shanghai, English-Language Summer Program, June 2015
Featured News
Featured News
Read: WABE 90.1 | Book explores the work and challenges of Black elders during slavery through reconstruction
Read: TODAY | It's Black History Month. Here's everything you need to know
Publications and Presentations
Publications and Presentations
Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom
Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom
In Black Elders, Frederick C. Knight explores the experiences of African Americans with aging and in old age during the eras of slavery and emancipation. Though slavery put a premium on young labor, elders worked as caregivers, domestics, cooks, or midwives and performed other tasks in the margins of Southern and Northern economies. Looking at black families, churches, mutual aid societies, and homes for the aged, Knight demonstrates the pivotal role of elders in the history of African American community formation through Reconstruction.
Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, including slave narratives, plantation records, letters, diaries, meeting minutes, and state and federal archives, Knight also examines how blacks and whites, men and women, the young and the old developed competing ideas about age and aging, differences that shaped social relations in coastal West and West Central Africa, the Atlantic and domestic slave trades, colonial and antebellum Southern slave societies, and emancipation in the North and South.
Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850
Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850
From the sixteenth to early-nineteenth century, four times more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. While this forced migration stripped slaves of their liberty, it failed to destroy many of their cultural practices, which came with Africans to the New World. In Working the Diaspora, Frederick Knight examines work cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, from West and West Central Africa to British North America and the Caribbean.
Knight demonstrates that the knowledge that Africans carried across the Atlantic shaped Anglo-American agricultural development and made particularly important contributions to cotton, indigo, tobacco, and staple food cultivation. The book also compellingly argues that the work experience of slaves shaped their views of the natural world. Broad in scope, clearly written, and at the center of current scholarly debates, Working the Diaspora challenges readers to alter their conceptual frameworks about Africans by looking at them as workers who, through the course of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation labor, shaped the development of the Americas in significant ways.
Black Women, Eldership, and Communities of Care in the Nineteenth Century North
Black Women, Eldership, and Communities of Care in the Nineteenth Century North in Vol. 17, No. 4, Fall 2019, Special Issue: Women and Religion in the Early Americas (pp. 545-561)
This essay compares the spiritual and material terms of aging among black women in the post-emancipation North. It contrasts the public representations of African American women elders and the more prosaic, material work that black women and broader northern free black communities performed in coping with the challenges of aging. Early American biographies of black women elders characterized them as pious exemplars of Christian virtue. They also showed how they used collective practices to cope with aging. Other sources reveal this communal ethos. The records of churches, mutual aid societies, black women authors, and others show how free black communities brought together religious and material resources to support African American women in the aging process. Through this "community of care," black Northerners provided material and spiritual support to an aging population of women.
The Many Names for Jarena Lee: A Note on Historical Sources
The Many Names for Jarena Lee: A Note on Historical Sources
Jarena Lee was the first woman preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. She joined the antislavery movement and had her autobiography printed, first in 1836 and then again in 1849. Despite these significant contributions, she faded from the historical record. This essay synthesizes disparate and in cases contradictory archival, published, and digital sources to uncover her place and date of death. This project thus adds new biographical information about Lee, and it also reflects on methodological issues posed by research in early African American women’s history.