Dr. Philip Misevich completed his Ph.D. at Emory University in 2008.  He arrived at Denison in 2009, where he will be teaching courses on African history.  Dr. Misevich’s courses will include surveys on precolonial and modern Africa.  He will also teach upper-level courses on Africa and the Atlantic slave trade, Southern Africa, Islam in African history and women in Africa.

Dr. Misevich’s teaching interests intersect with his research agenda.  His dissertation, “On the Frontier of ‘Freedom:’ Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790s to 1860s,” explores the relationship between the Atlantic slave trade, local slaveholding, and British colonialism on the outskirts of Freetown, Britain’s first African colony.  He has published essays in the journals New York History and The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, and in an edited volume entitled Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (Yale Press, 2008).  His book reviews have appeared in the Journal of Social History and History.Transnational. 

Dr. Misevich has contributed to several noteworthy projects that aim to document various aspects of the Atlantic slave trade.  He contributed new data for the online database entitled Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (online at www.slavevoyages.org), which includes information on nearly 35,000 Atlantic slaving vessels.  Misevich is also working with a team of scholars to develop Origins, a forthcoming online database that seeks to identify the ethnolinguistic origins of more than 67,000 individual Africans forced on slave ships in the 19th century.