2024–25

Fellow’s Talk: Yusuf Mansoor on Indigenous Slavery

2024–25 UCHI Fellow's Talk: "From New England to Tangier: Indigenous Slavery and the English Atlantic at the beginning of King Philip's War." Yusuf Mansoor, PhD Candidate, History, with a response by Heather Ostman. September 25, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library fourth floor.

From New England to Tangier: Indigenous Slavery and the English Atlantic at the beginning of King Philip’s War

Yusuf Mansoor (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UConn)

with a response by Heather Ostman (English, SUNY Westchester Community College)

Wednesday September 25, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk focuses on a group of Native Americans who were enslaved and sent to English Tangier in the 1670s. It will contextualize this enslavement by detailing the beginning of King Philip’s War to examine more closely who these captives were, where they came from, and how they came to be enslaved by English colonists. From there, the presentation will track their passage from New England to Tangier, as well as the transatlantic imperial connections that fueled this unusual path.

Yusuf Mansoor is a PhD candidate in the History Department, and the Draper Dissertation Fellow at the UCHI. His research focuses on Native Americans and the Atlantic World in the seventeenth century, with a focus on New England. He has received research fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, the American Philosophical Society, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Heather Ostman Heather Ostman is Professor of English, Director of the Humanities Institute, and Humanities Curriculum Chair at SUNY Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York. She is the author/editor of ten books, including Kate Chopin and the City: The New Orleans Stories (2024). She is the recipient of two NEH grants and a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and she is the co-founder and president of the Kate Chopin International Society. The UCHI Visiting Fellowship will enable Heather the time and space to work on her next book project, which is titled “Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace.”

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Announcing the 2024–25 Humanities Institute Fellows

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) is proud to announce its incoming class of humanities fellows. We are excited to host four dissertation scholars (including the Draper Dissertation Fellow and the Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow), four undergraduate fellows, eight faculty fellows (including the Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow and the Faculty Success Fellow), and three external fellows. We have fellows representing a broad swath of disciplines, including History; English; Sociology; Linguistics; Anthropology; Classics; Art & Art History; American Studies; Literatures, Culture and Languages; Drama; and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Their projects take many forms including scholarly monographs, plays, and books of photography; span time frames from the ancient world to the present day; and cover topics from sign language, to enslavement, to health and disease. For more information on our fellowship program see our Become a Fellow page. Welcome fellows!


Visiting Fellows

Sara Matthiesen (History & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington University)
“‘Free Abortion on Demand’ after Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States”

Jesse Olsavsky (American Studies & History, Duke Kunshan University)
“In The Tradition: The Abolitionist Tradition and the Roots of Pan-Africanism, 1830–1945”

Heather Ostman (English, SUNY Westchester Community College)
“Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace”

Undergraduate Fellows

Kathryn Andronowitz (Project advisor: Bhoomi K. Thakore)
“The Tradwife Cultural Economy: A Comparative Case Study of Self-Branded Housewife Influencers on Social Media”

Kanny Salike (Project advisor: Diane Lillo-Martin)
“The Evolution of African American English (AAE) and Black American Sign Language (BASL) in the United States”

Hailey Strom (Project advisor: Sara R. Johnson)
“The Self and the Other: Perceptions of Identity in Ancient Greece and the Achaemenid Empire”

Evan Wolfgang (Project advisor: Gary M. English)
“I Am Going to the Lordy: A Dramatic Parable about the Life and Death of Charles Julius Guiteau”

Dissertation Research Scholars

Joscha Jelitzki (Literatures, Culture, and Languages)
Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow
“The Anti-Jewish ‘Lust Libel’ and its Deconstruction by Jewish Writers in Modern Vienna”

Yusuf Mansoor (History)
Draper Dissertation Fellow
“Native Americans in Tangier: Slaveries in the Early Modern Atlantic World”

Danielle Pierratti (English)
“Unoriginal: Transvocal works from Dante’s Purgatorio

Julia Wold (English)
“Adapting Choice: Shakespeare, Video Games, and Early Modern Thought”

UConn Faculty Fellows

César Abadia-Barrero (Anthropology)
“Too Sick to Labor: Disease and Profit as the end of Capitalism”

Daniel Hershenzon (Literatures, Culture, and Languages)
“The Maghrib in Spain: Enslavement, Citizenship, and Belonging in the Early Modern Spanish Mediterranean”

Yohei Igarashi (English)
Faculty Success Fellow
“Word Count: Literary Study and Data Analysis, 1875–1965”

Hana Maruyama (History)
“Entangled Remains: Indigenous Relationalities & Caretaking in Japanese American Incarceration”

Gregory Pierrot (English)
“It Was Nation Time: Fictions of African American Revolution (Le Temps d’une nation noire: fictions révolutionnaires du Black Power)”

Janet Pritchard (Art and Art History)
“Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories”

Fumilayo Showers (Sociology)
Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow
“Learning to Leave: Health Professions Education, the Afropolitan Imaginary, and Migration Aspirations in a Migrant Sending Nation.”

Peter Zarrow (History)
“A History of the ‘Museumification’ of the Forbidden City, Beijing, from 1900 to Today”