ÐßÐßÊÓƵ

ÐßÐßÊÓƵ University Provost James Marquart is pleased to announce Dr. Jeff Forret has been selected as the Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow for Sep. 21, 2019-Aug. 31, 2021.

Forret was chosen through a rigorous review process of elected faculty members representing each of LU’s colleges. A total of nine candidates were considered – seven in the category of research/creativity and two in the category of teaching excellence.

“Given the quality and depth of each portfolio submitted for consideration, we based our decision on past success, significance of the work already completed and the potential influence of the candidate’s future pursuits,” said Marquart.

Marquart said Forret was selected based on his proven and internationally recognized track record of scholarly productivity, clearly defined and ambitious research plans that include works in-progress extending into 2022 and because his findings and published work have made a significant impact on ÐßÐßÊÓƵ University.

“Dr. Forret’s professional appointments, keynote addresses, invited lectures and presentations and his competitive research awards have brought creditable attention to ÐßÐßÊÓƵ University,” said Marquart. “Not to mention the letters of support and the vitae of historians who have written on his behalf were beyond enviable.”

Forret is a social historian specializing in southern history. He has spent his career studying poor whites and slaves, a difficult task, Forret explains, because his subjects are, for the most part, illiterate, lack resources and have no way of documenting their lives. “Successfully locating one, simple piece of information can take years; uncovering complex processes can take still longer,” said Forret. “I have spent as long as seven years researching one book.”

Forret’s first book, “Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside,” has informed modern-day conversations about poverty and has been cited in articles, both in print and online. Forret’s book “Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South,” has also allowed for informed discussion on the historically constructed notion of ‘black-on-black’ violence. The book won the 18th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University for the best book published in the English language on the subjects of slavery or abolition in 2015. The award is the highest award for research in the field, and Forret is the only recipient from a regional state school to receive the award in its 20-year history. It also earned an honorable mention in the U.S. history category at the 2016 Professional & Scholarly Excellence Awards and was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Book Prize given by the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery.

Forret’s next book, “Williams’ Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts,” will be published by Cambridge University Press this fall. It “likens the domestic slave trade of the pre-Civil War decades to today’s prison industrial complex, particularly the private, nonprofit prison system that passes prisoners around to facilities where their labor is most needed and forcibly extracted for almost no pay,” said Forret, who is a professor and graduate director in the Department of History.

Currently, Forret is working on a book titled “Slave Ships to Freedom,” which documents four cases in which the British government freed American slaves shipwrecked in British colonial Atlantic colonies. The book addresses the subject of reparations, which were paid not to slaves but to the slave masters from whom they were confiscated.

“As my career has progressed, I do feel a greater responsibility to historicize current issues with my scholarship, especially as the internet and social media have acquired the ability to transform uninformed opinion into fact,” said Forret. “Historians now have a genuine obligation to counter the misinformation that is readily available online.”

Forret’s research has inspired entire courses including “The Old South,” “American Slavery,” “Slavery & Gender in the American South” and “Race & Sex in America.”