Facing the Past: UPenn’s Ties to Slavery

Kathleen Brown, Professor of History, UPenn
VanJessica Gladney, Public History Fellow, UPenn

Kathleen Brown and VanJessica Gladney (Class of 2018) will discuss the impetus behind the creation of the Penn and Slavery student research project in Fall 2017 and some of its findings. The University of Pennsylvania, while not itself a slaveholding institution, was complicit in slavery in a number of historically significant ways, including its credentialing of generations of doctors who returned to the slaveholding South to “practice” plantation medicine on the bodies of enslaved people, exhausted and injured from coerced plantation labor.

Kathleen Brown is the David Boies Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality, and Women.

VanJessica Gladney is a 2018 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a Public History Fellow for the Penn and Slavery Project.