Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie

He has taught at Wesleyan University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Binghamton University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro]]. He has been at Howard University since 2006.

Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (born 1960), is a British historian and professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

His first book, Freedpeople in the Tobacco South, Virginia 1860-1900, expands the traditional periodization of US Reconstruction to argue for the making of a black peasantry as a consequence of transformations in the global tobacco economy. His second, Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World, examines commemorations of British colonial abolition and how these served as sites of anti-US slavery mobilization in the English-speaking Atlantic between the 1830s and 1860s. The third, Freedom’s Seekers: Essays on Comparative Emancipation, offers a broad transnational focus of experiences and lives challenging nation-centered histories that usually end up reifying exceptional narratives of emancipation. One “of the most informative and important books focusing on emancipations and the Atlantic world published in the last two decades,” concludes one reviewer. The fourth book, Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade, provides the first scholarly examination of the US maritime slave trade and a successful slave ship revolt in 1841 with international ramifications. One reviewer describes it as the “definitive book on the revolt and a model for transatlantic scholarship in the age of abolition.”