James Sweet, "Reimagining the African-Atlantic Archive: Method, Concept, Ontology."
James H. Sweet is Vilas-Jartz Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he is also chair of the History department. He received his undergraduate and MA training at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and completed his PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Sweet’s research and teaching interests range broadly across the history of Africa and the African diaspora. His book, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (2003) won the American Historical Association’s Wesley Logan prize for the best book on the history of the African diaspora in 2004. It was also a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize, awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University. His Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (2011) won the American Historical Association’s James A. Rawley prize for the best book in Atlantic history and most recently the 2012 Frederick Douglass Prize. Sweet is also the author of more than a dozen journal and book articles, as well as a co-edited volume (with Tejumola Olaniyan, UW English) entitled, The African Diaspora and the Disciplines (2010). He sits on editorial boards of three scholarly journals and is a book series editor at the University of Wisconsin Press. In addition to his scholarly work, Sweet has served as a consultant for the National Geographic Society, The History Channel, Kunhardt McGee Productions (PBS), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Mapungubwe Institute, and the Black Economic Empowerment Commission in South Africa.