Faculty

John Wess Grant

Rank: CAUSE Post-Doctoral Fellow & Assistant Professor of History
Ph.D.: Michigan State University, 2006
Department Member Since: 2008

Dr. Grant is a comparative historian specializing in African American, Caribbean, and West African History. His current research explores the relationship between black community development in the slaveholding American South and Liberia in West Africa during the 19th century. The purpose of this research is to test specific sociological theories that seek to explain how poverty is created and reproduced in Black Communities. Dr. Grant’s current book project, “Liberty Revised: The Trans-Atlantic Limitations of Free Black Community Development in Richmond, Virginia and Monrovia, Liberia, 1820-1870,” examines how free blacks engaged in the process of buying relatives and/or friends out of slavery contributed to the slow pace of economic and political development in the Richmond and Monrovia Black Communities. Dr. Grant earned his Ph.D. in History at Michigan State University, where he served as a Kings-Parks-Chavez Fellow and was awarded several Mellon Research Grants. His publications include, “Stranded Families: Free Colored Responses to Liberian Colonization and the Formation of Black Families in Nineteenth-Century Richmond, Virginia” in Allusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola, editors, The United States and West Africa: Interactions and Relations (2008) along with contributions made to Black Women in America: A Historical Encyclopedia (2005), and The Female Slave: An Encyclopedia of Daily Life During Slavery in the United States (Forthcoming).



Office:
BH 240
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Phone:
412.268.6215
Email:
jwgrant
@andrew.cmu.edu