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About the Center
The Gilder Lehrman Center strives to make a vital contribution to the understanding of slavery and its role in the development of the modern world. While the Center's primary focus has been on scholarly research, it also seeks to bridge the divide between scholarship and public knowledge by opening channels of communication between the scholarly community and the wider public. In collaboration with secondary schools, museums, parks, historical societies, and other related institutions, the Center facilitates a locally rooted understanding of the global impact of slavery. To foster this understanding, the Center offers a variety of programs including:
- Annual International Conference
- Lectures, forums, and workshops
- Visiting residential research fellowships
- Frederick Douglass Book Prize, an award for the most outstanding book in English on the subject of slavery, resistance, or abolition across time and all nations.
- Professional development workshops for high school and middle school teachers
- Accessible online databases of historical documents
- Management of the World Bibliography of Slavery and Abolition
- Annual Working Group interdisciplinary forum that brings together selected scholars to investigate specific themes related to slavery
- Other collaborative efforts with local, statewide, national, and international institutions to promote public education about slavery and its destruction
Contact Information
Mailing Address:
PO Box 208206
New Haven, CT 06520-8206
Shipping Address:
Luce Hall
34 Hillhouse Ave.
New Haven, CT 06511
Phone: 203-432-3339
Fax: 203-432-6943
Email: gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu
Directions to Luce Hall
David W. Blight, Director
Dr. Blight, the Class of 1954 Professor of History at Yale University, is the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received seven book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history. He is also the author of a book of essays, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (LSU Press, 1989). Professor Blight has also participated closely in the discovery and bringing to light of two new slave narratives in 2004 and will edit and introduce the forthcoming book, with Harcourt Press, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation.
As of the 2000 and 2004 editions, he is one of the authors of the bestselling American history textbook for the college level, A People and a Nation (Houghton Mifflin). Blight lectures widely on Douglass, Du Bois, and problems in public history and American historical memory. He teaches summer institutes for secondary teachers and for park rangers and historians in the National Park Service. He has also been a consultant to several documentary films, including the 1998 PBS series, "Africans in America," and "The Reconstruction Era" (2004). Blight has a Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has also taught at Harvard University, at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and for seven years was a public high school teacher in his hometown, Flint, Michigan.
David Brion Davis, Director Emeritus
David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and the founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, is the author of The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, and many other books. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the American Historical Associations' Albert J. Beveridge Award, the National Book Award, and most recently the 2004 Bruce Catton Prize of the Society of American Historians for lifetime achievement. Davis is also the recipient of the 2004 Kidger Award from the New England History Teachers Association given to honor his devotion to teaching. Currently, Davis is working on The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation to conclude his magisterial series, and is nearing completion of his new book, Of Human Bondage: Slavery in the New World. Davis received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1956. He served as President of the Organization of American Historians for the 1988-1989 term.
Angela Keiser, Special Projects Coordinator
Affiliated with the Gilder Lehrman Center since 2001, Angela Keiser currently serves as the Center's Special Projects Coordinator with primary responsibility for design, growth and expansion of its major education outreach program — the UNESCO Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project. As the TST Project New England Regional Coordinator, Angela works directly with education policy makers, university leaders, school system administrators, middle and upper grade teachers to elevate the quality of instruction in the origins, evolution and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and to promote intercultural student dialogue around this topic.
Beginning her professional career as Teacher, Guidance Counselor and Administrator in New York City public schools and the District of Columbia school system, she played an instrumental role in the development of new instructional approaches within a variety of school settings. Selected as an Education Policy Fellow (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation through George Washington University), Ms. Keiser was assigned to the Office of Legislation, U.S. Department of Education. Subsequently recruited by the Office of University Affairs (U.S. Department of Agriculture), Angela played an active role in this special unit, handling requests for technical assistance from a national network of land grant institutions of higher education. As an officer responsible for program development, refinement and logistics in one of Connecticut's six state-mandated regional public education resource centers, she worked in unison with K-12 school superintendents, district leaders and building staffs to create innovative curriculum and nurture 'real world' partnerships. Recruited by Amistad America, Inc. as Vice-President for Education, Ms. Keiser provided strong leadership and technical assistance in the shaping of the organization's educational mission. Both B.S. degree in French and M.S. in Counseling Psychology were awarded by St. John's University. Ms. Keiser has completed coursework for the Connecticut State Certificate of Administration.
Dana Schaffer, Assistant Director
Dana Schaffer received a B.A in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997 and an M.A. in Public History from American University in 2004. Prior to joining the Center's staff in August 2004, Dana served as a program coordinator for Smithsonian Journeys where she developed educational travel programs focusing on history, natural history, and arts and culture. Dana has also worked as the education coordinator for the New England Historic Genealogical Society managing research tours and programs for the Society's members. During her graduate work and as part of the after-school program KidPower DC, Dana worked with fourth and fifth graders in inner-city Washington, D.C., to foster the study of local history as a starting point for comprehensive citizenship training. Dana also served as assistant curator for the Mount Vernon Square Community Gallery exhibition at the City Museum of Washington, D.C. Dana is the author of "The 1968 Washington Riots in History and Memory," in Washington History, Fall/Winter 2003-2004, 15 (2).
Thomas Thurston, Education Director
Thomas Thurston holds a B.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MPhl in American Studies from Yale University. Prior to coming to the Gilder Lehrman Center he served as the Project Director of the New Deal Network, an educational website developed by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College, Columbia University. For his work developing the New Deal Network he received the first annual award for "Best Multimedia Resource" from the American Association for History and Computing and a "Best of the Humanities on the Web" citation from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In recognition of his innovative online scholarship in American legal history, Tom was invited to be a plenary speaker at the 2002 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools.
Tom has led week-long NEH workshops for K-12 teachers, has acted as a consulting historian for several Teaching American History programs, and has served as a curriculum developer for WNET's Educational Technologies Department, including the recent documentary series "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow" and "Slavery and the Making of America." He currently serves as an editor for H-TAH, the Teaching American History Discussion Network, a nationwide online resource for Teaching American History Project leaders.
Visiting Fellows
Robert E. Bonner (September 2008)
External Fellow, University of Connecticut Humanities Institute
Research Interest: Slaveownians Abroad: Southern Confederates on the Global Stage
Garnette N. Cadogan (November 2008)
Independent Scholar
Research Interest: Songs of Freedom: Jamaican Popular Music as Slave Narratives
Anna Mae Duane (October 2008)
Assistant Professor of English, University of Connecticut
Research Interest: Performing Freedom: The New York African Free School, Colonization, and Citizenship
Sindani Kiangu (September – December 2008)
Associate Professor of African History, University of Kinshasa, R.D.C.
Research Interest: Mgr. Daniele Comboni: Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition in Eastern Africa
Natasha J. Lightfoot (May 2009)
Assistant Professor of History, Columbia University
Research Interest: Race, Class, and Resistance: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in Antigua, 1831-1858
Mary Clay Oshatz (February – May 2009)
Assistant Professor of History, Florida State University
Research Interest: Morality Marching On: The Antebellum Slavery Debates and the Development of Protestant Liberalism, 1830-1890
Stacey Robertson (January 2009)
Chair, History Department, Bradley University
Research Interest: "On the Side of Righteousness": Women, the Church, and Abolition in the US
Joshua D. Rothman (March 2009)
Associate Professor of History, University of Alabama
Research Interest: Slavery and Speculation in the Flush Times: The Heart of Jacksonian America
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