As the first black faculty member to gain academic tenure at The Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Franklin W. Knight is important in the African-American history of the University. In 1973, Dr. Knight joined the Hopkins faculty as part of the internationally recognized Atlantic History and Culture Program. Since that time his academic and teaching interests have remained focused on the politics, cultures and societies of Latin America and the Caribbean as well as American slave systems. He has published numerous books, including The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Natitionalism (Oxford, 1978; 2nd Edition, revised 1990; 3rd edition, 2012), The Modern Caribbean, co-edited with Colin A. Palmer (University of North Carolina Press, 1989), The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (Macmillan, 1997) and Las Casas: An Introduction, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies (Hackett, 2003) to name just a few. His latest publication, Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context, co-edited with Teresita Martinez-Vergne (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). His Dictionary of
Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biographies edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. will appear from Oxford University Press in 2016. His analyses of Latin American and Caribbean history and politics have aired on National Public Radio, the Voice of America, the British Broadcas/ng Corporation, the McNeiltiLehrer Report, C-SPAN and a range of local radio and television programs.
Dr. Knight's contributions to the Hopkins community are also numerous. For more than thirty years, Dr. Knight has mentored a wide range of graduate and undergraduate students -- many of whom are now leading scholars of Caribbean and Latin American history in the own right. Between 1974 and 1982, he co-edited the Johns Hopkins University Press series, Studies in Atlantic History, Culture and Society. Dr. Knight is currently the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor
Emeritus of History and Academy Professor. Email:
fknight1@jhu.edu
