Marcus Rediker (author of Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery at Sea) in conversation with Nadia Nurhussein and Harris Feinsod

You’re invited to a special additional edition of Humanities in the Village, an event series in partnership with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which aims to make scholarship publicly accessible.

This event features Marcus Rediker, author most recently of Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea. We’ll celebrate this new volume by hearing from the author about the project of the book, which is provides definitive, sweeping account of the Underground Railroad’s long-overlooked maritime origins. A leading scholar of maritime history, Rediker puts his command of archival research on full display in this luminous portrait of the Atlantic waterfront as a place of conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation. Freedom Ship is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the complete story of one of North America’s most significant historical moments.

We are delighted that Nadia Nurhussein and Harris Feinsod will join Rediker in conversation.

Click here to RSVP

Order FREEDOM SHIP: THE UNCHARTED HISTORY OF ESCAPING SLAVERY BY SEA here

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. His “histories from below,” including The Slave Ship: A Human History, have won numerous awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, and have been translated into nineteen languages worldwide. He has produced a film, Ghosts of Amistad, with director Tony Buba, and written a play, The Return of Benjamin Lay, with playwright Naomi Wallace. His new book, “Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea,” will be published by Viking-Penguin May 2025.

Nadia Nurhussein is a Professor in English and Africana Studies, specializing in African American literature and culture. She is the author of Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry (The Ohio State University Press, 2013), and editor of a new edition of The Pedro Gorino by Harry Foster Dean and Sterling North (Broadview, 2024).

Harris Feinsod is a literary and cultural historian of the United States, Latin America, and the Atlantic world. He is the author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (2017), and the co-translator (with Rachel Galvin), of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poems (Open Letter, 2018), which was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry. He is now at work on “Into Steam: The Worlds of Modernism at Sea.” At Johns Hopkins, he directs the Tidewater Initiative, a multidisciplinary research group devoted to study, stewardship, and stories of working waterfronts, coasts, and oceans under conditions of globalization and environmental instability.