Slavery at Sea

Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, associate professor in the ­departments of history and African and African-American Studies in Arts & Sciences, takes a new look at slavery in her book “Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and ­Sickness in the Middle ­Passage.” Whereas much of the scholarship on ­slavery has focused on the ­plantation, Mustakeem shows how the oceanic transport of slaves, known as the Middle Passage, ­created the foundations of the “peculiar institution.” The book won the Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association in 2017.