This talk will be given by Bennett Parten, a doctoral candidate and a member of the Yale and Slavery Group which the institution’s president created and charged with studying the University’s history.

“As an American institution that is 319 years old,” President Peter Salovey wrote on creating the task force, “Yale has a complex past that includes associations, many of them formative, with individuals who actively promoted slavery, anti-Black racism, and other forms of exploitation. We have a responsibility to explore this history, including its most difficult aspects; we cannot ignore our institution’s own ties to slavery and racism, and we should take this opportunity to research, understand, analyze, and communicate that history.”

In his talk, Mr. Parten will discuss the university’s relationship to slavery and abolitionism, and show how campus debate evolved in the lead-up to the Civil War. His interests include the histories of race, slavery, abolition, and emancipation.

Bennett Parten is a Ph.D. student working on the 19th century United States. His interests include the histories of race, slavery, abolition, and emancipation. His recent work has focused on emancipation as a refugee experience and the presence of millennialism in the American Abolitionist Movement. He also works with Yale’s Center for Teaching and Learning as a Yale College Writing Partner.

Parten is from Royston, Georgia. He graduated with a B.A. in History from the University of Georgia in 2015 and, after that, an M.A. in History from Clemson University in 2017.