Dr. Herman L. Bennett

Herman L. Bennett is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center (CUNY) and Director of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC).  A faculty member of the Graduate Center’s PhD Program in History, the Program in Africana Studies, American Studies, and Global Early Modern Studies, Professor Bennett is a founding faculty member of the Seminar on Globalization and Social Change. 

Notable publications include:

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

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

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

          A recipient of 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, Membership at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and a Mellon Sawyer Seminar for “The Histories & Cultures of Freedom.”  In 2016, he was inducted into The Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.  He also received the American Historical Association Equity Award, for ‘excellence in recruiting and retaining underrepresented racial and ethnic groups into the Historical Profession.”  He advanced the mission of equity nationally by serving as the Director of the Office of Educational Opportunities and Diversity (EOD) from 2014-2020.  Last spring, he was in residency at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz as an Obama Fellow.  Professor Bennett was recently named a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, which comes with a three-year-long residency.

          A member of the Social Text Editorial Collective, the African-Atlantic Research Group in Berlin, the Mellon supported African/Black Diaspora Group at the University of Maryland, Humanities New York, and the External Board of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities; he currently is on the board of the Hispanic American Historical Review and the Americas and has also served on the editorial board of the American Historical Review.

          In 2021, he rotated off the board of the Association for the Study of the World-Wide African Diaspora (ASWAD).  In the Spring of 2022, he was elected Vice-President of Renaissance Society of America.  He is currently completing: “Bones of the Dead: Gender, Kinship & Black Temporality in Spanish America” while also working on a book-length project entitled: “An Unacknowledged Brief History: Afro-Germans and the Afterlives of Fascism & Jim Crow, 1955-1989”. 

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