Carolyn A. Brown

Carolyn A. Brown, is professor of history, at  Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. She became interested in African history during the 1960’s when African states were becoming independent. She grew up in Hampton, Virginia with a grandmother, a graduate (1898)  of Hampton Institute, always wanted to be a missionary in Africa. She carried this interest in Africa through her  B.A. from Hiram College (Ohio),  her Masters of International Affairs, from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and her PhD in History  from Columbia University. She specializes in African social, urban and labor history  and the history of slavery in Africa (primarily southeastern Nigeria) .She  was fascinated by the debates and radical interpretations of  the African working class by labor historians during the seventies and eighties. Prevented by apartheid from studying the South African miners she followed the suggestion of Walter Rodney, and focused her dissertation on the Enugu coal miners, an important group that played a crucial role in the nationalist movement in Nigeria. As the field of gender – male and female – became a focal point of Africanist study  she became interested in how African working men’s aspirations to fulfill new and ‘traditional’ models  of  masculinity influenced their support of radical nationalist movements. She is the author of We Are All Slaves: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery, Nigeria, 1914-1950, (Heinemann  2001), a co-editor, with Paul Lovejoy, ofRepercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Interior of the  Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora, (Africa World Press, 2010)  and co-editor with Judith Byfield, Ahmad Sikainga and Timothy Parsons of Africa and World War II (Cambridge University Press 2015). The latter is a collection of  essays by leading Africanist scholars documenting the rarely acknowledged role played by African countries and soldiers in the war.  She is working on an on-going project on the nationalist movement in Enugu, Nigeria that traces how race, class and gender identities shape and are shaped by the colonial city and how these identities influence the response of the ‘popular classes’  to nationalist discourse. She is especially interested in how, largely, young African men experiment with multiple forms of  indigenous and foreign masculinities  as clerical workers, young unmarried men in a “Cowboy” gang, business men, urban coal miners and professional letter writers or ‘bush lawyers’.   She  has served as a senior editor  and now  editorial board member of the labor journal, International Labor and Working Class History,  the editorial board of the Cambridge African Studies Series and on the Advisory Board of the International Review of Social History. In 2017-18 she directed a public history project ‘Global Timbuktu: Meanings and Narratives of Resistance in Africa and the Americas’  that brought  scholars from South Africa, Mali  and  the U. S.to to discuss the historical Timbuktu and it’s U.S. namesakes. There are  two Timbuktoo settlements in the northeast; both associated with the anti-slavery movement. One, founded in 1825 by Black freepersons on the Underground Railroad route in Burlington Township, New Jersey and the other an abolitionist settlement in the Adirondacks of New York was associated with John Brown  and is  the burial site of John Brown. The project included a ‘Student to Student’ SKYPE project when students in Bamako, Mali held several conversations with students in Burlington County high school.