Walter Hawthorne

Walter Hawthorne

Michigan State University, Professor and Department Chair

Hawthorne’s research focuses on the upper Guinea coast of West Africa and  Brazil during the era of the slavery and the slave trade. His scholarship bridges the Atlantic in a way that is fundamental to the themes of the expressive cultures project. Moreover, under his leadership, the digitial humanities and social sciences center at MSU has become the most important repository of digital documentation on slavery. The recent Mellon award ($1.3 m) is enabling the development of a an open source relational web platform that will also eventually house the website of this project.