Alexander X. Byrd

Associate Professor of History

Email: axb [] rice.edu Phone: x2541 Office: 323 Humanities

Education

• Ph.D. Duke University, 2001
• B.A. Rice University, 1990

Areas of Interest

• Atlantic World
• African Diaspora
• U.S. African American

Research and Teaching

Professor Byrd’s area of expertise is Afro America, especially black life in the Atlantic world and the Jim Crow South. He recently completed a history of free and forced transatlantic black migration in the period of the American Revolution, a book entitled Captives & Voyagers. The study follows the two largest steams of free and forced transoceanic black migration across the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world: enslaved black migration to Jamaica and free black migration to Sierra Leone. The book is propelled by the premise that it is possible to gain new purchase on the history of eighteenth-century transatlantic migration by examining free and forced migration together, and by paying careful attention to the social consequences of the actual processes of emigration.

Byrd has published essays addressing current debates over the nativity of Olaudah Equiano, and treating the social consequences of violence in the transatlantic slave trade. Other published work addresses teaching the history of lynching, and explores practicialities of civic engagement in African American studies research. Byrd’s oral history of Magdalene Dulin is in Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. His future projects include a history of two high schools in the urban south since the Brown decision (focusing on one school which began the period with an all black student body and another which was all white in the wake of the ruling ).

Byrd regularly offers a lecture and discussion course on The Atlantic World: Origins to the Age of Revolutions; courses exploring The Origins of Afro-America; and a first-year seminar in the School of Humanities on Brown v. Board. With Edward Cox, Dr. Byrd team teaches a survey of Afro American history called Blacks in the Americas. He also teaches the first half of the American history survey: Early America. In 2006, Byrd received the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching (an honor voted by alumni who graduated two and five years ago). He is an associate of Baker College.

Professor Byrd has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He is a member of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and a life member of the Southern Historical Association.

Selected Publications

• “Violence, Migration, and Becoming Igbo in Gustavus Vassa’s Interesting Narrative.” In Constructing Borders/Crossing Boundaries: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration, edited by Caroline B. Brettell. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007.
• “Africans in the Americas.” Review of Slavery and African Ethnnicities in the Americas by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. H-Atlantic, 21 Aug. 2006
• “Eboe, Country, Nation, and Gustavus Vassa’s Interesting Narrative.” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 123-148.
• “Studying Lynching in the Jim Crow South.” OAH Magazine of History, January 2004, 31-36.

Curriculum Vitae

CV as of 6/26/07 

Links

• “From Chattel to Human: Race, Politics, and American Revolution’s Black Refugees.” Webcast of Professor Byrd’s September 19, 2006 Scientia lecture.
• The Americas Colloquium at Rice University
• Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South at the Center for Documentary Studies
• Fall 2006
  
  • HIST 117 Early America
  • HIST/FSEM 163 Brown v. Board
  • HIST 510 Origins of Afro America (Graduate directed reading)