Student Reports
Throughout the fall 2019 semester, students continued to explore the themes of funding, the medical school, and the connections of individual trustees, faculty members, and students to slavery and the slave trade.
Nathan Coonts Student Report
Nate Coonts’ research on Penn Medicine’s ties to racist medicine and science expanded on past reports about the University’s medical curriculum, illustrating how students’ dissertations and theses expanded the nascent field of race science.
Zarina Iman Student Report
Zarina Iman’s report focuses on the early history of Penn’s endowment, exploring how enslavers in Jamaica helped the University establish its financial foundation.
Tandra Mitchell Student Report
Tandra Mitchell’s work explores the role that members of the Penn community played in the lead-up to and aftermath of Pennsylvania’s 1780 Gradual Abolition Act.
Collectively, these reports expand our understanding of Penn’s ties to slavery and the slave trade by illustrating how both the University’s operations and the knowledge that its students and faculty produced reinforced the idealogy of slavery in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
Penn & Slavery Project 