Knight, Frederick C.

Frederick Knight is an associate professor in the Morehouse College History Department and specializes in the history of the African Diaspora.

Prof. Knight has chaired the Morehouse history department since 2011 and mentored students who are pursuing graduate degrees in history or careers in various fields. He has served as director of the College’s general education program and helped lead the College’s first major overhaul of its core curriculum in decades.

He completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Riverside, in 2000, where he studied under the late Sterling Stuckey. While working on his doctoral theses, he completed a year of coursework at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. He has been on the faculty of the University of Memphis and Colorado State University, where he taught courses and conducted research on the history of Africa and its Diaspora. He has also held various research fellowships. He held a dissertation fellowship at the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a post-doctoral fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He was awarded a summer research fellowship at the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University. He also held the P. Sterling Stuckey Postdoctoral Fellowship of African-American history at the University of California, Riverside.

He has published a book and numerous articles on the history of the African Diaspora, and his work focuses on the experiences of enslavement. His book titled Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010) traces how Africans drew upon knowledge from their homelands to shape the agricultural and material worlds of New World slave labor camps. His current research centers on questions tied to generation in early African-American history, and he has recently published an article on Jarena Lee, the first woman preacher in the AME Church.