Robert Pierce Forbes

Assistant Professor

Office: Torrington Campus, Room 4
Phone: (860) 626-6891
Fax: (860) 626-6847
Email:robert.forbes@uconn.edu

Areas of Specialty

The Early American Republic, Slavery and Abolition, Constitutional History and Citizenship, African Americans in the North, The Atlantic World of Slavery and Commerce

Current Research Interests

Antebellum black political and social organization; the politics of slavery and its impact on American institutions.

Biography

Robert Pierce Forbes joined the faculty of UConn-Torrington in Fall 2007. He graduated summa cum laude from The George Washington University and received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1994. He helped to direct Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition from its inception in 1998 until 2004 and has taught at Yale, Wesleyan and Rutgers. He has lectured widely on the topics of slavery, abolition, and American history, and has chaired committees on history, culture, and tourism in Connecticut. He teaches courses in colonial history, slavery and "race," early American politics and society, nineteenth century American literature in cultural context, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. He lives in New Haven.

Selected Publications

The Missouri Crisis and its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

"'Truth Systematised': The Changing Debate over Slavery and Abolition," in John Stauffer and Timothy McCarthy, eds., Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New Press, 2006).

"African American Sites in Connecticut: A Laboratory for the History of Slavery and Human Rights," Connecticut History 44 (Fall 2005).

Co-author, "Foreword," special issue on "New Perspectives on the Transatlanic Slave Trade," William & Mary Quarterly, 58:1 (January 2001), with David Brion Davis.

Co-author, Francis Kernan, Esq.: The Life and Times of a Nineteenth-Century Politician from Upstate New York, with John D. Kernan and Karen Kernan (Utica: Oneida Historical Society, 1999).

"Slavery and the Evangelical Enlightenment," in Mitchell Snay and John R. McKivigan, eds., Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery (University of Georgia Press, 1999).