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UMD and UCC Doctoral Students Collaborate on Frederick Douglass

What do Talbot County, Maryland, and County Cork, Ireland have in common? Frederick Douglass, the distinguished nineteenth-century writer, orator, and major figure in abolition and emancipation in the United States and abroad. Born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Douglass travelled and spoke widely on Emancipation in the US and Home Rule in Ireland. 

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UMD and UCC doctoral students are joined by Dean Charles Caramello, Professors Mark Leone and Lee Jenkins, and Mr. Richard Tilghman on the lawn of Wye House, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore of Maryland, where renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass was once enslaved. Photo by Jeffrey Franke.

The Graduate School at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the College of Arts and Sciences at University College Cork (UCC) have joined together to sponsor a year-long graduate student project on this great historical figure. Not only was this project transatlantic, it also was interdisciplinary, bringing together archaeology students from UMD and literature students from UCC.

Concurrent seminars on Douglass were conducted at the two universities in January 2014, with the two groups of students often meeting together over Skype. The UMD students visited Ireland in September for a planning conference, and the UCC students visited Maryland in October for a symposium in which the two student groups  presented their research findings at a day-long symposium open to the public. The papers will be published in book form.

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“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
– Frederick Douglass

The symposium was followed by a program and reception for the students at Wye House, where Douglass had been enslaved. Hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Richard Tilghman, whose family has owned the property since the seventeenth century, the event included several representatives of the Frederick Douglass Honor Society and the Honorable John McDonough, Secretary of State for Maryland.

Dr. Mark Leone, Professor of Anthropology and associate dean in the Graduate School at UMD, and Dr. Lee Jenkins, Senior Lecturer in the School of English at UCC, led the collaboration. Dr. Leone is the director of Archaeology in Annapolis, and has been excavating the slave quarters at Wye House with UMD doctoral students.

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