Event Details - Researching Quakers and Slavery at Haverford Library

 Ten years ago, Katherine Gerbner was fortunate enough to hold the Gest Fellowship, which provided funding for a month of research at Haverford Quaker & Special Collections. She spent the month scouring 17th century Meeting records to try to understand better how Friends integrated slave-holding into their religious practice. She'll talk about what she found -- and what she didn't find -- during this informal discussion. 

 Bio: Katharine Gerbner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Her research explores the religious dimensions of race, authority and freedom in early America and the Atlantic world. Her first book, published in 2018, is entitled Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). She has previously written articles about Obeah, Quaker slavery, print culture, and theories of conversion. Her current project, “Constructing Religion, Defining Crime,” examines how black religious practices under slavery were excluded from emerging categories of “religion.”