Sowande’ Mustakeem’s groundbreaking study. Expanding the gaze even more widely, the book centers on how the oceanic transport of human cargoesknown as the infamous Middle Passagecomprised a violently regulated process foundational to the institution of bondage. Mustakeem is currently working on her next book focused on women and crime. This book reveals for the first time how it took critical shape at sea. She has been featured on BBC radio, and was on Henry Louis Gates’ PBS documentary series “Many Rivers to Cross.” She is also cohost of the Apple podcast “TheBookLane365”, which empowers future writers with tips and tools to activate productivity through writing. Mining ship logs, records and personal documents, Mustakeem teases out the social histories produced between those on traveling ships: slaves, captains, sailors, and surgeons. Her most recent contributions have appeared in BBC Magazine, the online publication Vox, “6 Myths About the History of Black People in America” and Keywords in African American Studies. Sowande Mustakeems groundbreaking study goes inside the Atlantic slave trade to explore the social conditions and human costs embedded in the world of maritime slavery.

She has articles published in The Journal of African American History, Atlantic Studies, along with a number of essays in edited volumes.

The audio version of Slavery at Sea was released spring 2021. She likewise won the 2020 Dred Scott Freedom Award for the Historical Literacy Excellence from the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation. Mustakeem is globally known for her two time award winning book, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (2016) which won the Wesley Logan prize in 2017 (jointly awarded by The American Historical Association and The Association for the Study of African American Life) for the best book for the history of the African Diaspora.

She is currently an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Mustakeem is a historian with broad specializations in slavery at sea, medicine, Black women’s history, terror, violence, slavery and memory, criminality, policing, gender and executions in history.

Slavery at Sea by Sowande M. Mustakeem