Research Topics:
Social justice and inequality | African diaspora | Body and embodiment | Critical race theory | Decolonizing studies and methodologies | Gender | Slavery, abolition and freedom | Africa | Black Canada
Afua Cooper is the Chair of the Scholarly Panel on Lord Dalhousie’s Relationship to Race and Slavery and co-author of the Report. She is also the former James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies (2011-2017). Her research interests are African Canadian studies, with specific regard to the period of enslavement and emancipation in 18th and 19th century Canada and the Black Atlantic; African-Nova Scotian history; political consciousness; community building and culture; slavery’s aftermath; Black youth studies.
At Dalhousie, Dr. Cooper established the Black and African Diaspora Studies Minor, the first of its kind in Canada. The new program attracted national attention in the form of a long write-up in Maclean’s Magazine. The article not only explains the value and significance of the new program, via an interview with Dr. Cooper, but also recalls the long history of hard work that laid the foundations for it, including the Transition Year Program set up in 1970 by Rocky Jones and James Walker.
Dr. Cooper founded the Black Canadian Studies Association (BCSA), a network of Black studies scholars, which she currently chairs. Over the years, the BCSA has held three successful biennial conferences and two workshops.
Selected publications
- 2017. ‘At Ontario Underground Railroad Sites, Farming and Liberty‘. New York Times, February 24.
- 2016. ‘Voices Heard Over the River: Henry and Mary Bibb, and the Role of the Black Press in the Underground Railroad Abolitionist Movements,’ in A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Freedom and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderlands, eds. Karolyn Smardz and Veta Tucker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press).
- 2009. My Name is Phillis Wheatley: A Story of Slavery and Freedom. Kid’s Can Press.
- 2009. ‘A New Biography of the African Diaspora: The Odyssey of Marie-Joseph Angelique, Black Portuguese Slave Woman in New France, 1725-1734,’ in Darlene Clark Hine, ed. Global Conversations: New Scholarship on the History of Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press), p. 46-73.
- 2007. ‘Unsilencing the Past: memorializing Four Hundred Years of African Canadian History,’ in David Divine, ed. Multiple Lenses: Voices from the Diaspora Located in Canada (UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), p. 11-22.
- 2007. ‘Acts of Resistance: Black Men and Women Engage Slavery in Upper Canada, 1793-1803,’ Ontario History 99, 1: 5-17.
- 2006. The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal (Toronto: HarperCollins). Published in French in 2007 as La Pendaison d’Angelique. Translated by André Couture. (Montréal: Les Éditions de L’Homme). Published in the USA in 2007 by the University of Georgia Press.