With a three-year, $2.65 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Slavery North initiative at UMass aims to expand research and understanding of slavery in Canada and the northern United States.

When people think about the transatlantic slave trade, they usually conjure up images of plantations in tropical locations, from the southern United States to the islands of the Caribbean. But what do we know about slavery in the northern United States and Canada?

Charmaine A. Nelson, UMass Amherst Provost Professor of Art History, is working to shed light on this under-researched aspect of slavery’s history as the director of the Slavery North initiative.

Slavery North is a unique research initiative, launched by Nelson in 2020 when she held a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. When she came to UMass Amherst in 2022, the initiative moved with her and rapidly gained traction.

“Art historians have been late coming to the table to study slavery,” she says. “But much of visual culture at that time was made to justify aspects of slavery, so we need social context for what we’re seeing in the art.”

Nelson says research into the lives of enslaved people in the north has developed slowly, partially because primary sources haven’t been properly catalogued and digitized for easy access and partially because institutions in the north prefer to publicize the region’s reputation for abolitionist activities.

“We need to find ways to accelerate scholarly work about slavery in Canada and the northern United States,” she says. “The Slavery North initiative will build cohorts of people who can come to the table, share ideas, and fuel more research in this area.”

Building support for a novel initiative

With its immense potential to produce new knowledge about those aspects of the transatlantic slave trade that have remained almost entirely unexamined to date, Slavery North was immediately recognized by the UMass Amherst Foundation Relations team as a strong candidate for funding support from the Mellon Foundation’s Higher Learning grant program.

“We need to find ways to accelerate scholarly work about slavery in Canada and the northern United States. The Slavery North initiative will build cohorts of people who can come to the table, share ideas, and fuel more research in this area.”
—CHARMAINE A. NELSON

The Mellon Foundation’s grantmaking focuses on fostering civic engagement and expanding public knowledge through support of the arts and humanities. The Higher Learning program works closely with colleges, universities, and other educational organizations to advance humanistic inquiry and promote social justice.

“Professor Nelson’s project aligns extremely well with Mellon’s goal to support transformational and socially relevant research,” says Marco Monoc, Executive Director of Foundation Relations. “Phillip Harper, the director of Mellon’s Higher Learning program agreed that Slavery North fills a critical gap in the official academic record. It makes possible a fuller appreciation of how the slave trade was powered by economic interests well beyond those geographic areas where historians have previously confined it. In addition, the terrific reputation that humanities and fine arts scholars on our campus have acquired over the years with Mellon through their own funded work influenced the success of this proposal.”

When Mellon agreed to look at a proposal for support of Slavery North, it became a university-wide endeavor.

“I received support at the department level, from deans, and from the Chancellor,” says Nelson, who made a point of noting the public-facing nature of Slavery North’s work. The proposal included, among other activities, lectures, a podcast, and artistic exhibitions that will be available to anyone.

The UMass Amherst Foundation Relations team stewarded the multi-month application process, building a relationship with the Higher Learning team director at Mellon and helping Nelson shape her ambitious vision into a persuasive proposal.

“We knew this program could be a unique marker for our campus,” says Monoc. “It was great to be part of something that will distinguish UMass and make it even more of a destination for top researchers than it already is.

“We are deeply grateful for the support we received both from the University and the UMass Amherst Foundation (UMAF). Chancellor Javier Reyes, Provost Mike Malone, and Vice Chancellor for Research & Engagement Laura Vandenberg were all instrumental in rallying resources of every variety to demonstrate the University’s commitment to the long-term sustainability of this initiative. Of no less importance were the contributions of Arwen Duffy and Kim Dumpson, UMAF’s President and Vice President, who helped develop a multi-layered strategy for engaging aligned donors of many different stripes.”

Expanding on this remarkable team effort, Rebecca Feinberg, Director of Foundation Relations, notes that “University leaders were generous in making both themselves and the resources and expertise of their respective offices available to us. The result was that we were able to benefit from the invaluable guidance of individuals like the Director of the Office of Pre-Award Services, Kristy Reese, and the previous Director of the Office of Research Project Management and Training, Ian Raphael. This was truly a collective effort.”

The Mellon Foundation approved the grant in November, giving the Slavery North initiative the support it needs to grow over the next three years.

Full Speed Ahead

One of Nelson’s key goals for the Slavery North initiative is to build a historical archive on its website to make documents and resources accessible to researchers anywhere.

“Right now, if you want to research most Canadian advertisements for enslaved runaways, which contain a wealth of information, you have to go in-person to various provincial archives and scroll through microfilm,” she says. “We want to be at the forefront of the digital humanities. We want to make it possible for someone studying these advertisements in Connecticut or New York to be able to easily access online examples from Canada for comparison.”

The Mellon grant will accelerate the identification, digitization, and cataloguing of materials that provide information about topics like slave dress, the lives of women and children under slavery, dangerous labor practices, and various types of resistance.

The grant will also support the creation of a fellowship program consisting of undergraduate honors, master’s and Ph.D. students, artists in residence, and postdoctoral senior fellows. This program will be the cornerstone of the initiative’s research enterprise, generating crucial knowledge about Canadian slavery, U.S. North slavery, the intersection of these practices with those in the Caribbean, and relations between Black and indigenous people in North America. All fellows will contribute to lectures, the podcast, and an academic conference that will be hosted at UMass in the second year of the grant.

All of this activity will serve to produce a rich body of research and cultural output that transforms the public understanding of transatlantic slavery in neglected regions and builds a community of scholars, artists, and thinkers who will carry this work into the future.

“The artist, the anthropologist, the historian are each going to ask different questions,” says Nelson. “If we don’t bring everyone to the table, the public understanding will never shift.”

This story was originally published by the UMass Amherst Foundation.