Friday Seminars

The McNeil Center sponsors a seminar that meets on Friday afternoons at 3:00 pm approximately twice a month between September and May, with the paper for each session circulated in advance. Over two hundred people attend at least once a year, with an average attendance of 40 to 50 at meetings held at various sites in the Delaware Valley. While most of the regular attendees are graduate students and faculty from institutions in the Philadelphia area, participants come from as far afield as Long Island, New York City, Princeton, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washington. 

In order to get an accurate count for the post-seminar happy hour, we are asking that attendees RSVP to mceas@sas.upenn.edu. To get access to the seminar papers and Zoom links, or to join our mailing list, please email us at mceas@sas.upenn.edu



1758: War and Trade on the West African Coast

Friday Seminar
Christopher L. Brown, Columbia University
Mar 22, 2024 at -

Dr. Christopher Leslie Brown is a historian of Britain and the British empire, principally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with special emphasis on the comparative history of slavery and abolition, and with…



‘Agent Greenhill taught his people better manners’: Masculine authority and subjection between stability and breakdown in the seventeenth-century Atlantic World

Friday Seminar
Phillip Emanuel, McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Apr 5, 2024 at -

Phillip Emanuel is a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His dissertation-to-book project focuses on how seventeenth-century imperial and trading company administrators in England…



“Kikrevou”(kì ire aiku): Sickness, Death, and Survival in the Jamaican Smallpox Epidemic of 1768

Friday Seminar
Elise Mitchell, Princeton University
Apr 19, 2024 at -

Elise A. Mitchell is a historian of the Black Atlantic. She is currently an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton University. She is…



"Freedom: A Rashomon Effect"

Friday Seminar
Scott Heerman, University of Miami and McNeil Center for Early American Studies
May 3, 2024 at -

Scott Heerman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami. He is the author of The Alchemy of Slavery (2018) and is at work on a manuscript that examines the international kidnapping of freed people in…