September 27, 2012
AMHERST, Mass. – Rebecca J. Scott, the Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, will deliver Amherst College’s annual Hugh Hawkins lecture, titled “’She Had Always Enjoyed Her Freedom’: Re-Enslavement and the Law in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” on Thursday, Oct. 4, at 4:30 p.m. in Pruyne Lecture Hall of Amherst College’s Fayerweather Hall. Sponsored by the Department of History, the lecture is free and open to the public.
Scott teaches courses on civil rights and the boundaries of citizenship in historical perspective, as well as seminars on the law in slavery and freedom. Her most recent book, coauthored with Jean M. Hébrard, is Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation, which traces the theme of the law in slavery and freedom through the examination of one family across five generations. Her previous book, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery, received the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize.
Scott received her bachelor of arts degree from Radcliffe College, a master of philosophy degree in economic history from the London School of Economics and a doctorate in history from Princeton University. She is a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The annual Hawkins Lecture honors Hugh Hawkins, professor emeritus of history and American studies at Amherst. A distinguished scholar of American higher education, of the American South and of cultural and intellectual history, Hawkins retired in 2000 after teaching for more than 40 years at Amherst, where he helped build both the history and the American studies departments.
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