Karolyn Smardz Frost in Conversation with Afua Cooper

Karolyn Smardz Frost and Afua Cooper
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - 11:45am
Dept. of African American Studies, Gordon Parks Room See map
81 Wall St., Room 201
New Haven

Karolyn Smardz Frost is the Senior Research Fellow for African Canadian History at the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University Toronto. Her volume, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2007. Critically acclaimed in both Canada and the US, it is the biography of fugitive slaves Thornton and Lucie Blackburn whose Toronto home she excavated in 1985. She is co-editor of The Archaeology Education Handbook: Sharing the Past With Kids (2000); co-author of The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! (2002); and co-editor of Ontario’s African-Canadian Past: The Writings of Fred Landon, 1918-1967 (2008).

Karolyn Smardz Frost is the Bicentennial Visiting Professor for Canadian Studies, 2012-2013, Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University 

View Karolyn Smardz Frost’s faculty page: http://afamstudies.yale.edu/faculty/karolyn-smardz-frost

Karolyn Frost Smard and Afua Cooper

Afua Cooper has done groundbreaking work on the 19th century transnational Black abolitionist movement and comparative Atlantic slavery. Her research on Canadian slavery produced the bestseller, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal, which cogently explores the life and death of Marie-Joseph Angélique, a Portuguese-born Black slave woman who was hanged in Montréal in 1734 for allegedly setting fire to the city. Dr. Cooper’s work on Canadian Black history and slavery has made her the leading authority on such topics. Afua Cooper is also a well-known poet, having published five books of poetry, including Copper Woman and Other Poems (Natural Heritage Press, 2006). 

 Afual Cooper is the James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia

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Co-Sponsored by the Dept. of African American Studies