
- Distinguished Professor, History, Africana Studies, American Studies, Global Early Modern Studies
- Director, Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC)
Research Interests
- Atlantic World, Latin American History, African Diaspora
Education
- Ph.D., Duke University
Contact
Herman Bennett is a renowned scholar on the history of the African diaspora, with a particular focus on Latin American history. Through his work, he has called for scholars to broaden the critical inquiry of race and ethnicity in the colonial world. He has written extensively on the presence of African slaves and freedmen in Mexican society during the colonial period and on the consequent interaction between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in colonial Mexico. Bennett has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has lectured widely in Europe and the Americas, and comes to the Graduate Center from Rutgers University after starting his scholarly career at Johns Hopkins University. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in Latin American history from Duke University where he was a Mellon Scholar of the Humanities.
In 2021, he was elected to become a Senior Editor of The Americas., and was appointed to the board of the Hispanic American Historical Review
Publications
"The African Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction" Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
“Writing into a Void: Slavery, History and Representing Blackness in Latin America” Social Text (Winter 2007).
