OAH Distinguished Lecturer Profile
Marcus Rediker is a Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. His books have won numerous awards and have been translated into sixteen languages. The most recent is The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (2017). He is the producer of the prize-winning documentary film Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps of the Rebels, based on his book The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (2012) and directed by Tony Buba. Rediker is currently writing a play, The Return of Benjamin Lay, with playwright Naomi Wallace, and working as guest curator in the J.M.W. Turner collection at Tate Britain.
*Ghosts of Amistad*, directed by Tony Buba is based on Marcus Rediker's *The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom* (Penguin, 2012). The film chronicles a journey to Sierra Leone in 2013 to visit the home villages of the rebels who captured the slave schooner *Amistad* in 1839, to interview elders about local memory of the incident, and to search for the long-lost ruins of Lomboko, the slave trading factory where their cruel transatlantic voyage began. The filmmakers rely on the knowledge of villagers, fishermen, and truck drivers to recover a lost history from below in the struggle against slavery. The American Historical Association awarded the film the 2015 John E. O’Conner Prize as the year’s best historical documentary.
