Henry Lovejoy

Professor Lovejoy focuses on the political, economic, and cultural history of Africa and the African diaspora.

Professor Lovejoy is director of the Digital Slavery Research Lab. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he held multiple awards including a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. His first book, Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions, is a biography of an enslaved African who rose through the ranks of Spain’s colonial military and eventually led a socio-religious institution at the root of an African-Cuban religion, commonly known as Santería. It won the Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano Foundation best book prize for Yoruba Studies; and was a finalist for the Albert J. Raboteau best book prize (Journal of Africana Religions). He is co-editor of the edited volumes Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896 (2020) and Regenerated Identities: Documenting African Lives (2022). He has also published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Journal of African History, History in Africa, Slavery & Abolition, among others. Professor Lovejoy is working on multiple projects related to the history of slavery, abolition, and African migrations, which intersect spatial statistical models, digital archives, and teaching resources. Multiple awards have supported his research, including from the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, among other opportunities through CU Boulder. He is affiliated with CU Boulder’s Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS); Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship (CRDDS); and Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis (LISA). He currently sits on the advisory board for the Black American West Museum & Heritage Centre (BAWMHC) in Five Points, Denver; and on the board of directors for Walk With Web Inc. (WWW), which is a gateway service to support and sustain several digital humanities publications.

Professor Lovejoy is accepting both M.A. and Ph.D. students.