Ellen Gruber Garvey on Ghost Stories of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Thomas Thurston talks with Ellen Gruber Garvey on her project titled “Ghost Stories of the Transatlantic Slave Trade”

Ellen Gruber Garvey is the author of Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks: from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. She recently retired as an English professor at New Jersey City University, where she co-edited the journal Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy.

She has written about nineteenth century media through many forms and issues — magazines, advertising, and women who edited magazines. She has worked as a journalist, printer, and editor; she has taught at the University of Paris 8, Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Massachusetts; and has held the Fulbright Walt Whitman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Her PhD is from the University of Pennsylvania; her  MA from the University of Massachusetts.

Recommended Resources:

• David W. Blight,  Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2002).
• Sharla Fett, Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade (University of North Carolina Press , 2016).
• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press , 2016).
• Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (HarperCollins Publishers, 2018).
• Tiya Alicia Miles, Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
• Charles Waddell Chesnutt, “Dave’s Neckliss” (Atlantic Monthly ,1889).

“Slavery and Its Legacies” is available on iTunes and SoundCloud. Email comments and suggestions to gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu with subject line “podcast”