Jesse Olsavsky

Jesse Olsavsky is a historian who focuses largely on the history of slavery, abolitionism, and their legacies. I teach courses on American history, American political institutions and Pan-African thought. I was co-director of the Freedom Lab, an interdisciplinary faculty-student research center devoted to the study of un-freedom and liberation in the modern world. I am currently co-director of the Gender Studies Initiative, which organizes academic lectures, conferences, discussions, as well as student research on the topics of Gender, Feminism, and Sexuality.

My First book is titled The Most Absolute Abolition’: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835-1861 (LSU Press 2022), which was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Book Prize.

I am currently working on my second book, tentatively titled “In The Tradition: The Abolitionist Tradition and the Routes of Pan-Africanism.” The project is an intellectual history of abolition’s subversive afterlives in the Pan-African Movement.

My current and past research has been funded by such institutions as the ACLS, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale University, and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.