Joseph Miller, the T. Cary Johnson Jr. Professor of History at the University of Virginia and a renowned historian of African slavery, will be the inaugural speaker in the annual David Brion Davis Lecture Series in the History of Slavery, Race and Its Legacies.

The lectureship was established by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition (part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies) and the Yale University Press to honor David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale and the founder and former director of the Gilder Lehrman Center. Davis is considered one of the world's leading scholars of slavery and abolition in an international context.

Miller will deliver a three-part series of lectures on the topic "The Problem of Slavery as History," Monday-Wednesday, Feb. 7-9. His first lecture, "The Problem of Slavery as History," will take place at 4 p.m. on Feb. 7 in the mezzanine of the Beinecke Library, corner of Wall and High streets. It will be followed by a reception. This lecture will explore how much of the academic work on slavery -- in all disciplines and throughout the world -- has treated the practice of slavery as a "static" institution. Miller will discuss slavery as a dynamic and dialectical process and will examine some 30,000 years of history to hint at some recurrent patterns through which "slaving" has moved throughout the world.

The historian's second lecture, "History and Slavery as Problems in Africa," will take place at 4 p.m. on Feb. 8 in the auditorium of Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave. In this talk, Miller will sketch the ways in which Africa resembled other parts of the Eur-Asian world in its "reliance on isolated and vulnerable individuals as slaves," he says.

Miller's final lecture, "Problematizing Slavery in the Americas as History," will take place at 4 p.m. on Feb. 9 in the Luce Hall auditorium. In this talk, Miller says, he will "redraw the familiar story of American slaving" in the context of the larger narrative of the development of Atlantic capitalism, and he will suggest parallels with Africa in the era of mercantilism. In his conclusion, Miller will refer to David Brion Davis' seminal works "The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture" and "The Problems of Slavery in the Age of Revolution."

The three-part David Brion Davis Lectures will be published each year as a series of books by the Yale University Press. David W. Blight, the Class of '54 Professor of American History and the current director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, will invite each year's speaker and work with the Yale Press to usher the books into publication. The lectures and books are intended to serve as contributions to new scholarship and imagination about the problems of slavery and its legacies in the modern world.

Future Davis Lecturers will include David Richardson, one of the world's leading economic historians of the slave trade; James B. Stewart, a leading scholar of American abolitionism and author of a biography of Wendell Phillips; and Caryl Phillips, the Afro-British novelist and nonfiction writer.

For further information, call the Gilder Lehrman Center at (203) 432-3339 or visit its website at www.yale.edu/glc.

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