Frederick C. Knight, Ph.D.

Frederick C. Knight is Professor of History at Howard University, where he serves as department chair and specializes in the history of the early modern African Diaspora and African American history through the nineteenth century. He is the author of Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010) and Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (Penn Press, 2024). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on black history, with his work appearing in the Journal of Negro History, the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, the Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, Early American Studies, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and The Conversation.

Professor Knight has held fellowships at the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University, and the University of California, Riverside, where he held the P. Sterling Stuckey Postdoctoral Fellowship in African-American history. He has also been awarded short-term fellowships by the Virginia Museum of History & Culture and the Huntington Library and an HBCU Faculty Research Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies to work on his next project titled “Black Belt Slavery: Land, Law and Labor in the Deep South.”