Herman L. Bennett is a Professor in the Ph. D. Program in History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).  Previously he was an instructor at the Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1992–93; asst. prof. The Johns Hopkins Univ. 1995–97; then at Rutgers—The State Univ. of New Jersey: asst. prof. 1997–2003, Association Prof. 2003–08, prof. 2008–09; and finally Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY 2009—

Prior to his academic appointments Professor Bennett earned BA with Highest Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986, his MA (in 1986) and Ph.D from Duke University (1993)

Some of his most notable publications include:

              “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the ‘History’ of the Black Atlantic,” African Studies Review, 2000;

              Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640, 2003;

              “‘Sons of Adam’: Text, Context, and the Early Modern African Subject,” Representations, 2005;

              “Genealogies to a Past: Africa, Ethnicity, and Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” New Studies in American Slavery, 2005;

              “Writing into a Void: Slavery, History and Representing Blackness in Latin America,” Social Text, 2007

              Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (2009)

              Africans Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty & Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (2019)

 He and Jennifer Morgan are completing the African Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (forthcoming: Oxford University Press)

As a student of the early modern African diaspora Professor Bennett primarily focuses on how dispossessed peoples navigate power and stake claims within the structures of dominance.  At its core, his work engages the earliest formations of blackness, experiences that he views as inseparable from the historical configuration of the West. Writing the history of the West from its margins plays a considerable role in his relationship to the historical profession. As a perspective, it has meant that he constantly searches for ways to assist students and colleagues in seeing themselves as stakeholders so as to negotiate the workings of institutions and cultural formations with the ability to effect change in existing structures.

Professor Bennett has been the recipient of numerous scholarly awards including two National Endowment for the Humanities Grants, a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University, an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship, and Membership at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.  The recipient of a Mellon Sawyer Seminar for “The Histories & Cultures of Freedom.”  In 2016, he was inducted into The Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.

 Previously, in 2013, he received the American Historical Association Equity Award, awarded for ‘excellence in recruiting and retaining underrepresented racial and ethnic groups into the Historical Profession.”  From 2013-2019, he Executive Officer of the Office of Educational Opportunity and Diversity Programs at the CUNY Graduate Center, a period when the office under his direction placed over 100 under-represented minorities into Humanities and Social Science Graduate Programs nationally.  Professor Bennett is the former editor of ‘Blacks in the Diaspora Series’ at Indiana University Press, a member of the Editorial board of the University of Florida Presses, a member of the Social Text Editorial Collective and was formerly on the editorial board of the American Historical Review a leading journal of the American Historical profession.

Find Herman Bennett’s university profile page here.