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Matt D. Childs is Director of the History Center at the University of South Carolina: http://www.cas.sc.edu/hist/hc/ He started teaching at the University of South Carolina in the Fall of 2009. Before joining the History Department at USC, Childs taught at Florida State University from 2001-2008. His primary research and teaching interests are Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic history with a particular emphasis on the importance of understanding the historical legacies of slavery and racism in shaping the modern world.
Professor Childs is the author of The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (2006), which was a finalist for the 2007 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Matt Childs has co-edited with Toyin Falola The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (2005) and The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa: Essay in Honor or Robin Law (2009). Childs served as an Associate Editor for the 6 volume Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (2008). He currently serves as the Humanities editor for the Cuban section of the Library of Congress Handbook of Latin American Studies, co-editor for the journal Notes and Records: An International Journal of African and African Diaspora Studies , and he is member of the editorial boards of The Americas and Atlantic History for Oxford University Press’ Oxford Bibliographies Online. Professor Childs has published articles in The Journal of Latin American Studies, The Americas, The Historian, The History Workshop Journal, and the Latin American Research Review among other journals. Childs has received research grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and other agencies to conduct research in Cuba, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States.
Current Activities
I am currently working on two book projects that place the historical experiences of Cuba's population of African descent in wider Atlantic World contexts. The first book "An African City in the Americas: The trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Havana, Cuba, 1762-1867" examines the role of enslaved and free Africans in Havana, Cuba with particular attention on African origins and racial and ethnic identity. The second project "Forcing the Balance of Power: Enslaved and Free People of Color Soldiers in the Atlantic World" focuses on the role of enslaved and free soldiers of African descent in imperial conflicts, independence wars, and national revolutions in the Atlantic World from the Seven Years War until the Cuban Ten Years’ War. I am finishing up two co-edited books, Igbos in the Atlantic World: Slavery and Cultural Adaptation in the African Diaspora, and The Urban Black Atlantic during the Era of the Slave Trade. In 2010 I published the following articles and chapters: "'The Revolution Against the French': Race and Patriotism in the 1809 Riot in Havana," in Christophe Belaubre, Jordana Dym, and John Savage, eds., Napoleon's Atlantic: The Impact of Napoleonic Empire in the Atlantic World; "Cuban Slavery," [Co-authored with Manuel Barcia Paz], in Mark M. Smith and Robert Paquette, eds. Oxford Handbook of Slavery; "Slave Culture," in Trevor Burnard and Gad Human, eds., The Routledge History of Slavery; "The 1812 Aponte Rebellion," in Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott, eds. Origins of the Black Atlantic; and "El actual periodo es muy delicado: La esclavitud en Cuba y el cambiante mundo Atlántico, 1750-1850," Caminos: Revista Cubana de pensamiento socioteologico, vol. 52-53. A current and past list of graduate students and their topics of study can be found on my CV.
Professor Child's C.V. is located here.
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