Faculty Listing

Alphabetical Listing
Listing by Field

 

  

Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie

Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 1993
Civil War & Reconstruction, Comparative Slavery & Emancipation, Sport & Society

Office: LT 717  
Phone: (607) 777-4167 E-mail: jkerrrit@binghamton.edu
My research and teaching interests concern the comparative and transnational dimensions of modern US history. I specialize in explaining the transition from slave to postemancipation societies during the 19th century.

I believe history should be an endless argument with the past. I agree with Flaubert that the writing of history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful. And I am persuaded that showing how the past was different suggests how the future can be different.

Recent or current undergraduate courses:

  • Civil War & Reconstruction
  • 19th-20th Century America
  • Africans in America
  • Sport & Society

Recent or current graduate courses:

  • Comparative Slavery
  • Comparative Emancipation
  • US Historiography

 

Significant Publications

Books:

  • The Cultural Politics of West India Emancipation, 1831-1861 (in progress)
  • Freedpeople in the Tobacco South, Virginia, 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)


Articles:

  • "Black Republicans in the Virginia Tobacco Fields, 1867-1870," (forthcoming in Journal of Negro History)
  • "African Americans," Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture, eds. Robert Gregg and Gary McDough (London: Routledge Press, 2000).
  • "Emancipation from The Communist Manifesto," Nature, Society, Thought 10:4 (1999), 523-38.

Grants and Awards

  • Senior Fellow, Gilder Lehrman Center for Slavery, Yale, CT, 2001
  • Caleb T. Winchester Teaching Award, Psi Upsilon, Wesleyan, CT, 1999
  • Fellowship, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, VA, 1992
  • Fulbright-Hays Scholarship, London, UK, 1985