| 1 | Name: | Dr. Philip Curtin | |
| Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | ||
| Year Elected: | 1995 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1922 | ||
| Death Date: | June 4, 2009 | ||
Philip Curtin was born in 1922 in West Virginia. He earned a history degree from Swarthmore College in 1948 and a doctorate from Harvard University in 1953. Following a brief tenure as an assistant professor at Swarthmore, Dr. Curtin joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in 1956, and over his 20 years there helped to establish African history as a field of academic inquiry. He has conducted extensive research on the Atlantic slave trade between 1600 and 1800, and his book The Atlantic Slave Trade (1969) became the starting point for all future research on the slave trade and comparative slavery. His innovative research significantly revised past understanding of the subject and delved for the first time into such areas as the health problems associated with the slave trade. Dr. Curtin's work eschews traditional ethnocentric perspectives in favor of the tools and techniques of economics, anthropology and history. The recipient of MacArthur and Fulbright Fellowships, Dr. Curtin was most recently professor of history at Johns Hopkins University from 1975 through his retirement in 1998. | |||