Chernoh Sesay Jr.

Chernoh M. Sesay, Jr. is an historian of the Black Atlantic and of colonial North American and antebellum United States history whose research focuses on the intersection of religion, black political thought, identity, and community formation. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Black Boston and the Making of African-American Freemasonry: Leadership, Religion, and Community in Early America. In this study, the early development of black Freemasonry, from its founder, Prince Hall, to its prominent antebellum member, David Walker, becomes a prism through which to consider various relationships between religion, gender, community, and interracial and black politics. He is also exploring how different forms of nineteenth and twentieth-century African American historicism were comprised of aligned and competing theological and secular concerns. He has published a book chapter in addition to articles in the New England Quarterly, the Journal of African American Studies, and the Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies. In addition to book reviews written for the Massachusetts Historical Review, H-Net Law, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the Journal of American History, Dr. Sesay has also written for Black Perspectives, the scholarly blog of the African American Intellectual History Society.