Philip Misevich

Philip Misevich is a scholar of the transatlantic slave trade with broad interests in the history of Africa, the Caribbean, and Brazil. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on each of these regions along with more specialized offerings on the history of slavery, abolition, and the Atlantic World. A passionate advocate for digital history, he challenges students and scholars to think boldly about how to reach wide-ranging publics with their work.

Misevich’s research considers how enslaved Africans and their descendants experienced slavery, the slave trade, and emancipation across the Atlantic World. His first book, Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790s to 1860s, probes how the growth of Freetown, a British anti-slavery colony in West Africa, transformed the trade in human and non-human goods in the major slaving centers on the colony’s southern frontier. The book reveals how two contrasting forces – one rooted in slave trading, the other in the conjoined projects of abolition and colonialism – collided along the southern Sierra Leone coast and profoundly affected the lives of free and enslaved Africans throughout the region.

Additionally, Misevich has been a part of several important public-facing projects that aim to document aspects of the transatlantic slave trade. He is the co-Principal Investigator of the African Origins database (www.African-Origins.org), which uses crowd sourcing to assess the likely homelands of more than 91,000 captives who were liberated from slave vessels in the nineteenth century. He is on the Steering Committee and has played a central role in the development of the Slave Voyages website (www.slavevoyages.org), which allows visitors to search records of more than 36,000 unique transatlantic slave voyages. Misevich also co-produced Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps of the Rebels, which was awarded the 2015 John E. O’Connor Prize by the American Historical Association for best historical documentary.