Biography

J. R. Kerr-Ritchie earned a B.A. in history at Kingston University in the UK, and a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked in the department since 2006. He served as Director of Graduate Studies from 2016 to 2024. During that time, the program became nationally ranked for which he received a Distinguished Faculty Award.

He researches slavery, abolition and post-emancipation, and the African Diaspora during the long nineteenth century. He has published four books, including Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade (Cambridge 2019), Freedom’s Seekers: Essays in Comparative Emancipation (Louisiana 2014), Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World (Louisiana 2007), and Freedpeople in the Tobacco South, Virginia, 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1999). His latest book manuscript is Prince of the Pen: The Life and Times of Dusé Mohamed Ali, International Journalist, Activist, and Actor. He has published peer-reviewed articles in Slavery and Abolition, the Journal of Caribbean History, the Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology & Heritage, Radical History Review, the Journal of African American History, Nature, Society, and Thought, Souls, and Lincoln Lore. He has authored ten different book chapters in edited collections.

He holds fellowships from the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina (2003-4), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York (2002-3), and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Yale University (2001-2). 

He teaches undergraduate surveys in the African Diaspora and specialized courses on Slavery and Law and Comparative Slavery. His graduate courses include Problems in the African Diaspora, Comparative Slavery, and Comparative Emancipation. He has supervised four PhD dissertations and one M. A. thesis while at Howard. 

He has made more than one hundred professional presentations in 15 countries and 18 states in the US. He has participated in Public History initiatives for the United Nations, the Smithsonian Channel, the National Humanities Center, and the Gilder Lehman Institute.

Professor Kerr-Ritchie believes that history is an argument without end and that it should liberate minds.