Trinity College Professor of History Scott Gac recently received a grant award for a research project in collaboration with the Stowe Center for Literary Activism. The History and Legacies of American Slavery Grant from the Council of Independent Colleges supports the efforts of independent colleges and their communities to better understand the complex histories and legacies of American slavery.
According to the grant proposal by Gac and the Stowe Center for Literary Activism, “Our project investigates Black Hartford from 1800–1830—the decades bracketing the 1823 founding of Washington College (now Trinity College)—to illuminate how slavery’s legal remnants and social afterlives shaped everyday life, politics, education, religion, and culture in lower New England. Although Connecticut adopted gradual emancipation in 1784, enslavement and unfree labor practices persisted in the state into the 1830s and 1840s. Simultaneously, as free Black communities grew in the state, new modes of anti-Black exclusion hardened: the 1818 state constitution disenfranchised Black men; colonization campaigns pressed for Black removal; and efforts to suppress Black schooling and antislavery expression intensified. Within this repressive climate, Hartford’s Black residents built churches, schools, businesses, literary and artistic cultures, and anticolonization activism. Centering these voices, the project traces how Black Hartfordites negotiated power, asserted personhood, and created vibrant public life in the very years a new Episcopal college took root and a young Harriet Beecher taught at the Hartford Female Seminary (1829-1832).
“For Trinity College, 1800–1830 is foundational to institutional identity and place. Understanding the College’s emergence amid gradual emancipation, Black civic formation, and white-led exclusion clarifies the local conditions that structured campus-city relations from the outset. The Primus Project—a campus-based initiative increasingly focused on recovering Black lives connected to Trinity and Hartford—provides the research engine and ethical framework for this work.
“For the community partner, the Stowe Center for Literary Activism, the research links directly to Hartford’s early 19th-century literary culture and to Black-led critiques that prefigured later antislavery writing. For Hartford residents, this research restores names, neighborhoods, institutions, and debates that continue to shape civic memory, educational equity, and cultural life.
“Public-facing deliverables—podcast, public forum, and community education modules—will translate archival findings into usable local history. Together, we shine new light on the era of Northern emancipation and the ways systems of slavery—North and South—shaped life in New England.”
Projects funded by this grant must include a public-facing component and a collaboration between a CIC member institution and at least one community-based organization, such as a local museum or historical society, a public library, a school district, a civic organization, or another college or university in the region. The CIC said that projects that combine original undergraduate research and public-facing activities were strongly preferred.
Project teams from the selected institutions will participate in a workshop on the public history and memory of American slavery in June 2026.
This grant program is supported by the Mellon Foundation.
Katsuya Izumi, senior lecturer in language and culture studies, has received a grant award from the Northeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies to support research for an upcoming book.
Trinity College Assistant Professor of International Studies Natassja B. Gunasena was awarded a Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars to support research that she plans to publish as a book.
A striking and colorful piece of art in the Cornelia Center created by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt underwent a thorough restoration this summer, nearly three decades after its installation.
Trinity College students Augustin Millet ’28 and Noah R. Turner ’27 spent a month conducting archaeological research in Greece this summer alongside Associate Professor of Classical Studies Martha K. Risser.
