
Frederick C. Knight, PH.D.
Morehouse College
- Associate Professor
Education
-
Morehouse College
Bachelor of Arts, History -
University of California, Riverside
Master of Arts, History -
University of California, Riverside
Doctor of Philosophy, History
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.
Contact:
Email
frederick.knight@morehouse.edu
Office Location
Massey Leadership Center, Room 412
Phone
(470) 639-0324
Office Hours
Tuesday and Thursday
1:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
Publications & Presentations
“Black Women, Eldership, and Communities of Care in the Nineteenth Century North”
2019, Early American Studies
“The Many Names for Jarena Lee: A Note on Historical Sources"
2017, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
FEATURED CONTENT
IAS UMN
The Third Moment of the Sun: Black Elders and Generational Politics in Early America
In this presentation, Professor Frederick Knight (Morehouse College) uses generation as a category of analysis to interpret early African-American history. He shows how age was tied to labor and production in the early African-American experience; how elders shaped early African-American culture; how tensions, conflicts, and bridges arose between different generations of African-Americans; and how people used age to advance particular interests. Drawing on written, visual, and audio materials from a wide range of sources, Professor Knight argues that age mattered to black people in early America.