Research

“Expanding and Sustaining Enslaved.org: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade,” National Endowment for the Humanities. PI. $349,802.87. 10/01/2023-09/30/2025.

“Enslaved.org Summer Faculty Institute: Data Informed Methods in Slavery Studies,” National Endowment for the Humanities, PI. 11/1/2023-11/1/2024. $234,939.81.

“Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade,” The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Co-PI. Phase 3. Co-PI. Grant period: 04/01/2021-03/31/2024. $1,400,000.

“Formulating General Education at Michigan State University,” The Teagle Foundation, Co-PI. Grant period: 01/01/2021-12/31/2021." $24,000.

“Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade,” The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Co-PI. Phase 2 implementation. Grant period: 07/01/2019-09/30/2020. $850,000.

“Ubuntu Dialogues,” The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Co-PI and in partnership with Stellenbosch University Museum and Michigan State University. Grant period: 01/01/2019-12/31/2021. $395,000.

“Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade,” The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Co-PI. Phase 1 proof-of-concept grant period, Grant period: 01/01/2018-06/30/2019. $1,472,000.

“Biographies: The Atlantic Slaves Data Network,” National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Grant. PI. Grant period: 07/01/2011-12/31/1012. $99,994

“Social History of The Gambia: Rescuing an Endangered Archive, Police and Court Records.” Endangered Archives Programme. PI. July 2010 through December 2010. Grant Period: 06/01/2010-08/31/2010. $11,663.

“Islam and Modernity: Alternatives in Contemporary Senegambia and Ghana,” National Endowment for the Humanities Grant. PI. Grant period: 10/01/2012-09/30/2015. $200,000.

National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, August 15, 2008-August 14, 2009. $60,000

Michigan State University Intramural Research Grant Proposal Award.  Spring 2008.  $25,000

Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Fellowship, for research in Guinea-Bissau, Portugal and Brazil, September 2004-September 2005. $75,000

Ohio University Research Committee Grant, for research in Guinea-Bissau, June - September 2004. $5,000

Ohio University Institute for the African Child Grant, for research in Lisbon, June-September 2002. $3,500

Ohio University Research Committee Grant, for research in Guinea-Bissau, June - September 2000. $5,000

Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Write-up Grant, June 1996 - June 1997. $15,000

Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Research Fellowship, September 1995. $15,000

Fulbright Fellowship for dissertation research in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, October 1994 to September 1995. $25,000

Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship to study advanced Graça in Guinea-Bissau, Summer 1994. $10,000

Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship to study Graça in Guinea-Bissau, Summer 1993, $10,000

Enslaved: The People of the Historical Slave Trade. http://enslaved.org. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. https://jsdp.enslaved.org/. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Slaves Data Network. http://slavebiographies.org/. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Islam and Modernity. http://aodl.org/islamicmodernity/. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600 to 1830, African Studies Series (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1450-1850 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).

“Revolutionary Probate Records in the Fairfax Court Slavery Index, 1767-1791,” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 4, no. 1 (2023): 41-47, https://doi.org/10.25971/m823-ab61, Heather Bollinger, Justin Crouch, and Walter Hawthorne

“Defining Regions of Pre-Colonial Africa: A Controlled Vocabulary for Linking Open-Source Data in Digital History Projects,” History in Africa 25 May 2021, https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2020.17, Henry B. Lovejoy, Paul E. Lovejoy, Walter Hawthorne, Edward Alpers, Mariana Candido, Matthew S. Hopper, Ghislaine Lydon, Collen E. Kriger, and John Thornton.

“Maranhão Inventories Slave Database, 1767-1831,” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 1, 1 (2020).

 “The enslaved ontology: Peoples of the historic slave trade,” Journal of Web Semantics 63 (August 2020), Cogan Shimizu, Pascal Hitzler, Quinn Hirt, Dean Rehberger, Sheila Gonzalez Estrecha, Catherine Foley, Alicia M. Sheill, Walter Hawthorne, Jeff Mixter, Ethan Watrall, Ryan Carty, and Duncan Tarr.

“Redefining African Regions for Linking Open-Source Data,” co-authored with Henry B. Lovejoy, Paul E. Lovejoy, Walter Hawthorne, Edward A. Alpers, Mariana Candido, and Matthew S. Hopper. History in Africa 46, (2019), 5-36.

“The historical roots of multicultural unity along the Upper Guinea Coast and in Guinea-Bissau,” Walter Hawthorne and José José Lingna Nafafé. Social Dynamics 42, 1 (2016).

“‘Sendo agora, como se fôssemos, uma família’: laços entre companheiros de viagem no navio negreiro Emília, no Rio de Janeiro e através do Mundo Atlântico,” Revista Mundos do Trabalho 3, 6 (2011), 7-29 (translation).

“Gorge: An African Seaman and his flights from ‘freedom’ back to ‘slavery’ in the early nineteenth century,” Slavery and Abolition 31, 3 (September 2010), 411-28.

“From ‘Black Rice’ to ‘Brown’: Rethinking the History of Risiculture in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Atlantic,” American Historical Review 115, 1 (February 2010), 151-163.

“‘Being now, as it were, one family’: Shipmate bonding on the slave vessel Emilia, in Rio de Janeiro and throughout the Atlantic World,” Luso-Brazilian Review 45, 1 (2008), 53-77.

“Nourishing a Stateless Society during the Slave Trade: The Rise of Balanta Paddy-Rice Production in Guinea-Bissau,” Journal of African History 42 (2001): 1-24.

“The Production of Slaves Where There Was No State: The Guinea-Bissau Region, c. 1450 - c. 1815,” Slavery and Abolition 20, 2 (August 1999): 97-124.

“The Idea of the Atlantic World from an Africanist Perspective,” Companion to African History (Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 353-66.

“The Cultural Meaning of Work: The Black Rice Reconsidered,” in Rice: Global Networks and New Histories, ed., Francesca Bray, Peter A. Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black, and Dagmar Schaefer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 279-90. Volume translated into Chinese and published by Shanghai University of Finance & Economics Press, 2023.

“Technologies, African,” in The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, ed. Joseph C. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 449-452.

“States and Statelessness,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, ed., John Parker and Richard Reed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 77-93.

“Guinea-Bissau,” with Clara Carvalho. Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. Africa (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010), 258-63.

“Women in Africa from 1000-1500,” Encyclopedia of Women in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

“Guinea-Bissau,” in Encyclopedia of the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

“The Strategies of the Decentralized: Defending Communities from Slave Raiders in Coastal Guinea-Bissau, 1450-1815,” in Fighting Back: African Strategies against the Slave Trade, ed. Sylviane Diouf.  (Athens: Ohio University, 2003), 152-169.

“Migrations and Statelessness: The Expansion of the Balanta of Guinea-Bissau, 1900-1950,” in Migrations anciennes et peuplement actuel des côtes guinéennes, ed. Gérald Gaillard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 139-150.

“Revolutionary Contradictions: Slaveholding and Virginia’s Founding Generation,” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 3, 3 (2022).

“Those Who Made Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro: Uncovering Lives through Datasets and Linked Open Data,” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 2,1 (2021)

“Editors’ Introduction,” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 1, 2 (2020), Walter Hawthorne and Daryle Williams.

“From Slave Biographies to Enslaved: People of the Historical Slave Trade: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade,” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 1, 1 (2020).

“Republic of Cape Verde (República de Cabo Verde),” in World Encyclopedia of Political Systems and Parties (New York: Facts On File, 1999).

“Bissagos,” in Encyclopedia of the Middle Passage (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007), 60-61.

“Decentralized societies and the slave trade,” in Encyclopedia of the Middle Passage (Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn.: 2007), 134-136.