Columbia researcher to discuss slave trade abolition at MSU event

Contact: Maridith Geuder

STARKVILLE, Miss.--A Columbia University historian of the early British empire's efforts to abolish the African slave trade will discuss his research Wednesday [Sept. 23] at Mississippi State.

Christopher L. Brown, author of "Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism" (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), speaks at a 4 p.m. public program in the McCool Hall atrium.

Titled "Anniversaries and Teleologies: Slave Trade Abolition Two Hundred Years Later," his presentation is sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities, a part of the university's College of Arts and Sciences.

"Moral Capital" won the 2007 Frederick Douglass Prize from Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center and was praised in the Journal of American History as "beautifully written."

A Rhodes Scholar, Brown also has written "Arming Slaves: From the Classical Era to the Modern Age" (Yale University Press, 2006). For his many professional contributions, he was awarded the American Historical Association's 2007 Morris D. Forkosch Prize and 2006 James A. Rawley Prize, among other honors.

He currently is working on two projects: the British experience along the West African coast in the era of the Atlantic slave trade and the decline and fall of the British planter class in the era of abolition and emancipation.

Brown holds a bachelor's degree from Yale University and a doctorate from Balliol College of Oxford University.

NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS: For more information on Dr. Brown's campus visit, telephone 662-325-2646.

For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.