Anthony Bogues, professor of Africana studies, has been selected as the first director of the long-stalled Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, the University announced Tuesday. His three-year appointment marks a significant milestone for the center, a high-profile recommendation of the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice's 2006 report that foundered in recent years as two external candidates turned down the position.
Bogues, who served as the chair of the Africana studies department until 2009, is a renowned scholar in a wide array of topics within Caribbean and African studies.
Bogues will begin his tenure July 1. An inaugural interdisciplinary faculty board for the center should be assembled at the end of the summer or the start of the academic year, he said.
Bogues said his plans, some of which were outlined in previous University reports, include on-campus initiatives and longer-term efforts to establish the center as an international locus of scholarship on issues related to slavery. The center will likely focus on setting down roots on campus in its first year, Bogues said, an effort that will include a 2013 international conference on "slavery and the making of the modern world" as well as activities related to the University's 250th anniversary in 2014.
Beyond that, Bogues said he hopes to involve the center in undergraduate and graduate curricula and bring visiting fellows to the University.
Bogues said he hopes the center, which does not yet have a finalized location, will serve as an academic wellspring for both the University and the world.
"The center becomes a space where all these things can be discussed and where people can think very carefully (about) some of the great issues of yesterday that may impact upon the great issues of today," he said. It will also focus on examining slavery in contexts beyond its place in United States history, Bogues said.
The Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, which was spearheaded by President Ruth Simmons, formed in 2003 with the goal of examining the University's historical ties to slavery.
Brown's example spurred universities around the country to undertake similar initiatives, said Seth Rockman, associate professor of history and a member of the incoming faculty board. "Other schools look up to what Brown's done," Rockman said. "To institutionalize the central recommendation of that report ... is just tremendous."
After the steering committee's 2006 report, a subsequent committee in 2008 endorsed the creation of a center to address the issues in a more formal capacity. But a prominent historian and a Harvard professor both turned down offers to lead the center in the following years, The Herald reported last month. The University then turned to an internal search, and Bogues was selected this spring while on a visiting fellowship at Stanford University.
"He would have had to be on anyone's list," said Professor of Economics Glenn Loury, a faculty board member and chair of the 2008 committee.
Bogues has been involved with the initiative since the creation of the steering committee, on which he served, said Jim Campbell, the steering committee's chair and a former associate professor of American civilization, Africana studies and history who now teaches at Stanford.
"Tony Bogues was an absolutely crucial member of the original Slavery and Justice Committee, and our final report embodies a lot of his wisdom and vision," Campbell said. "He's not only a marvelous scholar and teacher, he's just an exceptionally decent and humane man, so I can only hope that some of that character will rub off on the institution that he'll be directing."
The center will also boost Brown's profile as a site of thought on slavery and justice, taking advantage of Brown's interdisciplinary strengths to examine these issues, said Professor of English Philip Gould, who will also serve on the center's faculty board. "It has large historical breadth, and it really is germane to the politics of slavery and the problems of enslavement globally today," Gould said.
Matthew Guterl, a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington who will teach at Brown and serve on the faculty board next year, praised the University for using the center to "aspire to a higher ethics," he wrote in an email to The Herald.
"This should be a part of university life," he wrote. "And I'm impressed at Brown's eagerness to take a leadership role in this critical work."
The faculty board was chosen by Simmons, Dean of the Faculty Kevin McLaughlin P'12 and Provost Mark Schlissel P'15. Though the board has not yet met or solidified plans for the center's future, Rockman expressed enthusiasm about its potential. "I think we're going to bring a lot of disciplinary perspectives and a lot of different kinds of political commitments to the table," he said.
Schlissel said the center's development will be a major boon for the Brown community. "We think it will really be a stimulus to fantastic research and teaching that will help us better understand these important issues," he said.
And after half a decade of waiting, Bogues said the progress announced Tuesday will spur much faster development of the goals initially outlined by the steering committee. "Obviously that process is finished," he said. "That timeline will pick up momentum very quickly."
