Tony Frazier

Dr. Tony Frazier is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on comparative history of slavery and emancipation in modern Britain, Atlantic slavery, Black British history, African American intellectual history and memory, labor, material culture, and digital history. Dr. Frazier is currently writing his book manuscript titled Air Pure Enough for Slavery: English Slavery, Law, and Self-Emancipation. This project investigates the meaning of freedom and liberty in English society, particularly as it relates to enslaved Black people, both before and after the 1772 Somerset Case. I demonstrate that we need to decentralize legal case law and center archival documents that are often marginalized in the history of British slavery. In doing so, we achieve a more nuanced understanding of how British slavery ended in England. Reverence of law as the only understanding of how slavery ended obscures the complexities of society and culture, especially when the law is applied very differently to people of different identities and conditions.

Dr. Frazier is a co-editor of an encyclopedia project – Historically Black Colleges and Universities: An Encyclopedia. Historically Black Colleges and Universities: An Encyclopedia is a collection of essays, organized in a multi-volume set, that narrate the histories and significant contributions of each of the over 100 schools, which were founded between 1835 and 1965 for African Americans and subsequently designated “Historically Black Colleges and Universities” by the Higher Education Act of 1965.

Dr. Frazier has two continuing digital history projects. The first project documents the origins of Emancipation Days and memory in African American communities after the Civil War. The second digital project documents the Amistad revolt.

Dr. Frazier has taught a range of graduate and undergraduate courses including Slavery in the Americas; Introduction to the Caribbean; Problems in European History; Seminar in African American History; The African Presence in Latin America; Introduction to African Diaspora; Comparative Slavery; European Intellectual History; Europe since 1914; Slavery and Freedom in the Black Atlantic; Modern Western World; and the African Presence in the English Archives.

His research has been funded by the National Humanities Center and the Center for Humanities and Information.

Recent Academic Publications:

Frazier, Tony, J. Jones, C. Jimenez, and S. Garcia. “Chapter 12: ‘Creating More Inclusive Spaces for African American Studies and Ethnic Studies in Digital Humanities Workshops.’” Digital Humanities Workshops, edited by Laura Estill and Jennifer Guiliano, 1st ed., Routledge, New York, NY, 2023.

Selected Awards and Fellowships:

• Just Transformations Commonwealth Fellowship with the Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR), 2024-2025
• The Center for Humanities and Information (CHI) Faculty Fellow, 2024-2025
• The Richards Civil War Era Center Faculty Fellow, 2023-2024
• National Humanities Center Fellow, 2021-2022
• ACLS Fellow, New Storytellers Summer Research Institute in Digital Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, 2021
• Duke University Mellon Foundation-John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Digital Humanities Initiative Fellow, 2017-201

Recent Courses Taught:

HIST 211: Slavery and Freedom in the Black Atlantic
HIST 250: HIST 250: Introduction to the Caribbean
HIST 435: HIST 435: Topics in European History