Chaired by Dr. Jennifer Anderson (Stony Brook University), this panel examines the lives of enslaved people in New York, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley. Past scholarship has primarily focused on the seaport of lower Manhattan and the labor routines that developed around an urban environment. This panel casts a larger net, inserting the Hudson Valley plantations and the slaveholders of Long Island into this dialogue of slavery in the North.
Jennifer Anderson: Panel Chair
Jennifer Anderson, Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY), specializes in Early American and Caribbean History. She has a PhD from NYU and an MA
from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. She is the author of Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012), which explores how consumer demand for tropical hardwoods, harvested by enslaved Africans, transformed 18 th -century social
and environmental relations in the Atlantic region. Her fellowships and awards include the ACLS Fellowship, the Early American Studies’ Murrin Prize, the Society of American Historians’ Nevins Prize, a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and an Emmy nomination for research for “Traces of the Trade,” a documentary about the Northern slave trade. She has worked as a curator, researcher, exhibition developer, and consultant at over a dozen museums.
Sylvea Hollis: Panelist
Sylvea Hollis is an Assistant Professor in African American History at Montgomery College. She earned a Ph.D. in US History from the University of Iowa. Before coming to Montgomery College, Dr. Hollis was the inaugural National Park Service-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality, and she taught in the American Studies Department at The George Washington University. Hollis earned a MA in History Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program (SUNY-Oneonta) and has a BS in History from the University of Montevallo, a small public liberal arts institution in Alabama. Much of her interests in the history of slavery in New York, developed while conducting research for her master’s thesis on African Americans in Cooperstown, New York. Hollis’ public humanities work seeks to bridge the gap between historical research, archive methods, and teaching. She regularly posts about all three on her blog: https://www.sylveahollis.com/ .
Lauren Brincat: Panelist
Lauren Brincat is the curator of Preservation Long Island, a regional organization with a mission to celebrate and preserve Long Island’s diverse cultural and architectural heritage through advocacy, education, and stewardship of historic sites and collections. Lauren has worked in New York museums and historical societies for over two decades, specializing in exhibition and program development, historic house interpretation, and collections management. She is currently the co-president of the Long Island Museum Association and a member of the museum advisory committee of the Bowne House Historical Society in Flushing, Queens. She previously held positions at the New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York. Lauren’s current curatorial work emphasizes community and institutional collaboration across the region with initiatives such as the Jupiter Hammon Project and the Art of Edward Lange Project. Lauren holds a B.A. in History and Anthropology from the College of William and Mary and an M.A. from the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.
Myra Armstead: Panelist
Dr. Myra Armstead is Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies and Vice President for Academic Inclusive Excellence at Bard College. She is the author of Freedom’s Gardener: Horticulture and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America and Mighty Change; Tall Within: Black Identity in the Hudson Valley; and “Lord, Please Don’t Take Me in August”: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870 to 1930. She recently completed another book–Memory and Enslavement: Schuyler House, Old Saratoga, and the Saratoga Patent in History, Historical Practice, and Historical
Imagination—which will appear late this spring.