Presented by the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, the CSSJ Slavery, Democracy, and Racial Violence in the Americas Seminar provides a series of lectures on slavery, racism, and violence in the modern and contemporary Atlantic World. These lectures offer an overview of the legacies of colonialism and the enslavement of Indigenous and African peoples in the making of racialized societies across the continent.

A historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations, Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. He is the director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. His most recent books are Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (CUP 2020, co-authored with Ariela J. Gross) and Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (CUP 2018, coedited with George Reid Andrews). He is also the curator of several art exhibits dealing with racism in Cuba. One of these exhibitions, Diago: The Pasts of this Afro-Cuban Center, is currently (February-July 2022) on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.