Walter Johnson
Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
Address:
Department of African and African American Studies
Harvard University
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Biography
Walter Johnson's work focuses on slavery, capitalism, and, increasingly, imperialism. His book, Soul by Soul, used the slave market as a way into the fantasies, fears, negotiations, and violence that characterized American slavery. Since the book, his work has followed two courses. On the one hand, he wrote a series of essays about social and historical theory: on notions of time in American slavery; on the idea of "agency" as the organizing theme of scholarship on slavery; on theories of capitalism and slavery; and on the idea of reparations for slavery as a historical narrative. On the other, he has been working on a history of the Mississippi Valley between the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War entitled River of Dark Dreams : Slavery, Capitalism, and Imperialism in the Mississippi Valley . Without giving up the focus on the immediate experience of slavery and mastery upon which he focused in Soul by Soul, this book will embed the history of slavery in the U.S. in the histories of global capitalism (especially the cotton trade and the Atlantic money market) and U.S. imperialism (the Louisiana Purchase , the Mexican War, and the illegal invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s).
Walter Johnson received his B.A. from Amherst College and his doctorate from Princeton University . Before coming to Harvard, he taught History and American Studies at New York University.
Curriculum Vitae
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