Transition Towns Marin

Loyola University Chicago will host a symposium entitled “Slavery and Abolition: Then and Now” on Thursday, April 23, 2009.   The symposium’s organizers believe that to understand the rising epidemic of slavery and human trafficking in the twenty-first century global economy, one must comprehend the critical part slavery and slave-trading played in the rise of the first modern global economy (ca. 1500-1800).   In the same way, devising strategies to bring modern slavery to an end can benefit from studying the abolitionists of the past.

The world’s leading scholar of the slave trade and author of multiple award-winning publications, including The Slave Ship: A Human History, Professor Marcus Rediker, and the world’s foremost scholar on modern slavery and founder of the today’s largest abolitionist organization (Free the Slaves), Kevin Bales, will deliver keynote addresses for the symposium at 7pm in Galvin Auditorium, Sullivan Center, Loyola University Chicago Lakeshore Campus. Located on the fourth floor of the new Richard J. Klarchek Information Commons, daytime panels will begin at 10am and will feature prominent scholars, activists, and community members who are working to combat human trafficking and are studying the problem of slavery then and now.

Brief biographies of the speakers are included below.

We ask that non-Loyola students make a $1 donation to the Loyola chapter of Invisible Conflicts, the leading student organization on campus devoted to the modern abolitionist struggle.

Loyola's Lakeshore Campus is located at 6525 N. Sheridan Rd., Chicago, IL. 60626. Loyola University is off the "Loyola" stop on the Redline and Bus #147 or #151 Kenmore Ave. stop. Paid garage and limited street parking are available. Directions to on-campus locations will be posted. 

Please contact Professor John Donoghue, Department of History, Loyola University Chicago with any questions. (jdonoghue@luc.edu).

Thank you for your time and consideration and we hope you will join us on Thursday, April 23.

Sincerely, 

Loyola University Chicago Slavery and Abolition Symposium Committee  

Speaker Biographies

Marcus Rediker is the author of five award-winning books, most recently The Slave Ship: A Human History, which garnered the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize, sponsored C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.  While one of America’s foremost historians of colonial America and the early modern Atlantic world, Professor Rediker has also been active in a variety of social justice and peace movements, most recently in the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty.  Currently a visiting professor at Cornell University, he is also Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.

Kevin Bales is the world’s leading authority on modern slavery and is also president of Free the Slaves, the U.S. affiliate of today’s largest abolitionist group, Anti-Slavery International. The United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, and governments the world over have turned to Professor Bales for guidance on combating human trafficking and modern slavery.  The author of many works on modern slavery and abolition, his 1999 book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.  Kevin Bales is Professor Emeritus of Roehampton University, London.

Katherine Kaufka, one of the country’s leading advocates for victims of child trafficking, is the former Director of the National Immigrant Justice Center and serves now as Executive Director of the International Organization for Adolescents (IOFA). She has testified before the Illinois Legislature and United States Congress on the growing problem of human trafficking.   Ms. Kaufka returned at the beginning of April from Kosovo, where she served on a Department of Justice mission to educate and train Eastern European governments on best practices regarding the struggle against the modern slave trade.

James Garbarino, Director for the Center for the Human Rights of Children at Loyola University Chicago, is an internationally recognized authority in the field of child psychology.  Professor Garbarino has advised several state governments, the United States government, and the United Nations on the psychological damage that “socially toxic” environments, ranging from poverty to war, exact upon children. The author of many award-winning books and articles, Garbarino currently serves as Professor of Child Psychology at Loyola.

Boaz Johnson is professor of theology at North Park University in Chicago. Growing up among the desperately poor in New Delhi, India, Johnson witnessed friends vanish into slavery and lives of brutal exploitation.  Johnson combines his work as a theologian with his work as a modern abolitionist, speaking on the role of faith in creating a world free from slavery. Professor Johnson hopes that educating our youth about modern slavery will raise a new generation of abolitionist Josiahs, modeled after the child in the Bible whose faith and dedication led to a renewal of justice-seeking spirituality in the Kingdom of Judah. 

Artemis Gaye fled the Liberian Civil War with a vivid memory of the ambiguity of the history of his native land, an African nation founded by former American slaves.   As a living descendant of Abduhl Rahahman and Isabella, two former slaves whose miraculous journey to freedom was immortalized in the PBS documentary, Prince Among Slaves (2008), he is passionate about the preservation and recovery of their legacy and that of others long forgotten or lost.  Mr. Gaye is President of the Board of Directors for the Prince Ibrihima and Isabella Freedom Foundation and is currently pursuing his PhD in Ethics at Loyola.

John Donoghue’s 2009 spring semester History 300 students organized and raised the funds for the “Slavery and Abolition: Then and Now” symposium.  Donoghue’s forthcoming book with the University of Chicago Press, ‘Fire Under the Ashes’: The English Revolution and the Atlantic World argues that the first organized attempt to end slavery in the colonies developed as slavery itself took form, thus backdating by nearly a century the formation of what scholars traditionally recognize as the rise of abolitionism. Donoghue has also published articles on the seventeenth century origins of “kidnapping” as it relates to slave labor and the part similar techniques play in human trafficking in today’s global economy. After teaching in public schools for close to a decade, Donoghue is in his second year as assistant professor of history at Loyola.