Lawrence F. Brewster Lecture in History

Black Pirates: The Curious Early History of the Amistad Rebellion

September 10, 2009 | Wright Auditorium | 7:00PM

Dr. Marcus Rediker is a world-renowned scholar of maritime history.  After completing his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Rediker taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994, before moving to the University of Pittsburgh where he now serves as professor and chair of the department of history.

Dr. Rediker has authored or co-authored five books: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987), Who Built America? (1989), The Many-Headed Hydra (2000), Villains of All Nations (2004), and most recently, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007). For The Slave Ship, Dr. Rediker was awarded the 2008 James A. Rawley Prize, given by the American Historical Association; the 2008 George Washington Book Prize, given by the Gilder Lehrman Institute; and the 2008 Merle Curti Award, given by the Organization of American Historians.

His works have been translated into French, Gern, Greek, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. Dr. Rediker has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Andrew P. Mellon Foundation.

Dr. Rediker has been active in a variety of social justice and peace movements, most recently in the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty. He has described himself as “by ancestry, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch, and Cherokee; I am, by upbringing, a Southerner; I am, by generation, of the New Left; I am, by choice, a citizen of the world.”