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Join the Minda de Guznburg Center for European Studies for the fourth Stanley Hoffmann Annual Lecture on France and the World. This year's lecture features a conversation with Jennifer Pitts and CES Resident Faculty Mary D. Lewis.
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s book Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787) – the first comprehensive antislavery treatise by a Black writer in the Western world – called for immediate abolition and enjoined the British nation to undertake a comprehensive reparation of relations with the enslaved people and African polities that had been devastated by the triangular trade. Presenting evidence that the French politician Condorcet was the principal agent in quickly bringing Cugoano’s powerful jeremiad to the French reading public in an anonymous translation, perhaps in collaboration with his wife Sophie de Grouchy, Jennifer Pitts considers the implications of this episode for our understanding of the transnational abolitionist movement on the eve of the French Revolution.
The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) inaugurated the Stanley Hoffmann Annual Lecture on France and the World on March 6, 2020. This lecture series honors the intellectual legacy of Stanley Hoffmann, who served as Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University and was a co-founder of CES. Hoffmann, a prominent public intellectual on both sides of the Atlantic, served on the Harvard faculty for nearly 60 years, drawing thousands of students to his celebrated courses.
