Institute Staff

               We would like to introduce ourselves as co-directors of the Institute. We are Morgan Grefe, Director of the Goff Center for Education and Public Programs at the Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS), and Joanne Pope Melish, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky . Both of us have Ph.D.s in American Civilization from Brown University .  Joanne is a specialist in the history of New England slavery, emancipation, and race, and on the public history of American slavery.  She has co-directed two previous NEH Summer Institutes and has presented workshops on her specialties for several Teaching American History (TAH) and public history programs.  While Morgan’s areas of academic expertise have focused largely on 20th century topics, she specializes in exploring how people remember, interpret and memorialize controversial history.  At the RIHS, Morgan has directed two TAH grants and presented at TAH projects.  Both of us have also worked extensively with Brown University’s Slavery and Justice Committee and The Choices Program on their curriculum unit, “Forgotten History: New England and the Slave Trade.”  We have a strong commitment to public history and to our nation’s teachers as the most important single source of public history education

               Our Institute team includes three other members.  Marie Parys, a former high school social studies teacher and librarian who also has served as a TAH project director and coordinator for five years and is the RI state coordinator of History Day, will serve as the project coordinator.  She will be your main point of contact for this project—answering any initial questions you may have, helping participants to make travel and housing arrangements, facilitating stipend payments, and making all other Institute arrangements.   The team will be rounded out by a curriculum specialist and a master teacher, each of whom are experts in their areas and who will work one-on-one with you.  Dr. Ellen Bigler, Professor of Education Studies and Anthropology at Rhode Island College (RIC), will serve as our curriculum specialist.  She writes and makes presentations on language and classroom politics related to race and class, and she has developed curriculum for the state of New York and continues to teach curriculum development at RIC.  Richard Martin, who will be our master teacher, is a three-year veteran of the Teaching American History Program in Rhode Island and holds a masters degree in African-American Studies. He is in his twenty-eighth year of teaching in middle and high school and is now an instructor for Primary Source on the topic of the West African Slave Trade.  He also has served as an instructor at RIC on the topic of “Perspectives of West African and Afro-American Culture.”  He now teaches pedagogy at Providence College . 

               The ten other participating scholars and public historians are all outstanding specialists in their fields. Among them are James Oliver Horton, the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University and Historian Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.; James T. Campbell, Professor of History at Stanford University and chair of Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice; Margaret Newell, Professor of History at Ohio State University and author of the forthcoming “The Drove of Adam’s Seed”: Indian Slavery in Colonial New England ; and Joseph Inikori, author of The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. The Institute will also include a screening of the award-winning documentary film, Traces of the Trade: A Story of the Deep North, and a workshop with the filmmaker, Katrina Browne.