Franklin W. Knight



Franklin W. Knight is Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. A graduate of the University College of the West Indies-London [B. A.(Hons.) 1964], he gained the M. A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1969) degrees from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University in 1973.

Knight has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Ford Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. He has served on committees of the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Inter-American Foundation, the National Research Council, the American Historical Association, the Conference of Latin American History, The Latin American Studies Association, The American Council of learned Societies, the Historical Society, and the Association of Caribbean Historians. His analyses of Latin American and Caribbean problems have been aired on National Public Radio, the Voice of America, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the McNeill/Lehrer Report, and many local programs on commercial and public radio and television stations across the United States. He served as academic consultant to the television series Columbus and the Age of Discovery; The Buried Mirror; Americas; Plagued: Invisible Armies; and Crucible of Empire: The War of 1898.

Knight's research interests focus on social, political and cultural aspects of Latin America and the Caribbean, especially after the eighteenth century as well as on American slave systems in their comparative dimensions. His major publications include: Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Wisconsin, 1970); The African Dimension of Latin American Societies (Macmillan, 1974); The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (Oxford, 1978; 2nd Edition, revised 1990); Africa and the Caribbean: Legacies of a Link co-edited with Margaret Crahan (Johns Hopkins, 1979); The Modern Caribbean co-edited with Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hill, 1989); Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850 co-edited with Peggy K. Liss (Tennessee, 1991) and, UNESCO General History of the Caribbean, volume III: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (London and Basingstoke: UNESCO Publishing/Macmillan Educational Publishing, 1997). He was also the co-translator of Sugar and Railroads, A Cuban History, 1837-1959 by Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro García (Chapel Hill, 1998).

Between 1974 and 1982 he co-edited the Johns Hopkins University Press series of studies in Atlantic History and Culture; and between 1975 and 1986 he edited the Caribbean section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies published by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. He is currently writing a monograph on Spanish American Creole Society in Cuba, 1740-1840 and the Rise of American Nationalism.