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A Professor of African American Studies & History at Emory University, Dr. Walter C. Rucker has published more than 100 journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, essays, and encyclopedia entries in a range of venues since 2000.  His books include Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power (Indiana UP, 2015), The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (LSU Press, 2005), a co-edited two-volume work entitled The Encyclopedia of American Race Riots (Greenwood Press, 2006), and a co-edited three-volume work entitled The Encyclopedia of African American History (ABC-CLIO, 2010).

He has taught a range of graduate and undergraduate courses including Atlantic Cultures, 1500-1800; Atlantic World Slavery; the Atlantic Slave Trade in History and Memory; Slavery, Culture, and Resistance; the African Diaspora in the Americas; Culture, Society, and History in Ghana; Graduate Seminar in West African Societies and Cultures; Introduction to African American and Diaspora Studies; Black Atlantic Crosscurrents; the Black Atlantic World; Black Atlantic Communities and Cultures; and the Comparative History of the African Diaspora.

Recent & Upcoming Talks

“Decoding Our Country Marks: Ethnonyms and the Mapping of African Atlantic Political Terrains,” African Ethnonyms and Identity in the Era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Conference and Workshop, University of Essex, Colchester, UK, September 2022.

“‘Our Danger is Great and Certain’: Gabriel’s Conspiracy and the Louisiana Purchase,” African American Intellectual History Society, Austin, TX, March 2020.

““From the Gold Coast to Carolina: Atlantic Africa & the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor,” St. Helena Branch Library, St. Helena, SC, December 2019.

“Ruptures and Silences: Studies of Africa, the African Diaspora, and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Archival Lives Conference, Emory University, Atlanta, December 2019.

“The Scholarship and Intellectual Legacy of P. Sterling Stuckey,” Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, Williamsburg, VA, November 2019.

“From White Redemption to Black Nadir: Race, Repression, and Resistance in the Jim Crow South,” Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Teacher Seminar, Academic Alliance in Innovation, Cumming, GA, March 2019.

“Atlantic African Religions, Ritual, and Cultures in America,” Jonkonnu Symposium: Enslaved Lives, Traditions, and Cultures in the Americas, The North Carolina History Center, New Bern, NC, November 2018.

“The Scholarship and Intellectual Legacy of P. Sterling Stuckey,” Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Indianapolis, IN, October 2018.

“Marking Our Cultural Exchanges: Historicizing Intra-African Socio-Cultural Matrices in the Black Atlantic World,” Exchanging Our Country Marks @ 20 Plenary, The Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, Sevilla, Spain, November 2017.

“‘Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power,” Department of History, Smith College, Northampton, MA, October 2017.

“From Coromantee to Maroon to Jamaican: Grandy Nanny and the Making of Modern Jamaican Identity,” The Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Hempstead, NY, June 2017.

“‘I Knew Him in Coromantee Country’: (Re)configurations of Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast Diaspora,” New Perspectives on the 18th and 19th Century Black Experience Lecture Series, Department of African American Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, April 2017.

“‘Earth from a Dead Negro’s Grave’: Ritual Technologies and Mortuary Realms in the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast Diaspora,” Ghana Studies Association, Cape Coast, Ghana, July 2016.

“Obeah, Oaths, and Ancestors: Ritual Technologies and Mortuary Realms in the Gold Coast Diaspora,” The Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, Charleston, SC, November 2015.

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