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Researching Modern Day Slavery: History Professor Receives Rockefeller Fellowship

Audra Diptee
Professor Audra Diptee

Professor in the Department of History Audra Diptee has won a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre Residency Fellowship for 2018. She will embark on a month long writing residency at the Bellagio Centre in Italy.

“I was delighted when I heard the news—primarily because the objectives of the fellowship program align almost perfectly with my own research agenda,” said Professor Diptee.

“The Rockefeller Foundation has a strong interest in projects that have a direct impact on the lives of poor and vulnerable populations around the world.”

Central to her project New Strategies for the Battle Against Modern Day Slavery is an exploration of the ways in which historians can better contribute to the challenges facing the humanitarian sector in general and anti-slavery initiatives in particular.

“I feel quite fortunate that I will be able to write in a multidisciplinary environment with academics, activists, and artists who are trying to develop non-conventional approaches to real world problems,” said Diptee.

New Strategies for the Battle Against Modern Day Slavery develops the ideas that have been laid out in her article The Problem of Modern Day Slavery: Is Critical Applied History the Answer? which is to be published in a forth-coming issue of the journal Slavery & Abolition. In short, through its analysis of anti-slavery discourses and initia-tives, this project will contemplate the ways in which power dynamics legitimate certain ways of knowing, interrogate the ahistorical tendencies of institutionally produced discourses, and problematize how various notions of the past come into conflict. This is a continuation of her ongoing research.

“My work on modern slavery is actually part of a larger project called History as Weapon: Writing Radical Caribbean Histories in which I argue that the methodology of Critical Applied History is a necessary tool for reorienting Western discourses about the region—and the Global South more generally—that are pervasive in politics, policy, as well as development and humanitarian discourses,” explained Professor Diptee.

The Rockefeller Foundation awards these residencies to individuals who are on “a strong upward trajectory” and whose research aligns with the Foundation’s efforts. When asked to reflect on achieving this prestigious recognition, Diptee was quick to thank her students.