James Searing, associate professor of history and African American studies, received an eight-month Fulbright grant to Senegal. He is using his award to conduct field research and update an exhibit on slavery and the slave trade at the Gorée Island Historical Museum with colleagues from the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, the oldest research institute in Francophone Africa.

Searing received his first Fulbright grant in 1983 to study in Senegal, focusing on Wolof society under colonial rule. Wolof, the largest ethnic group in Senegal, is the dominant culture. In 1988 he received another Fulbright to teach U.S. and African history for two years at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal.

Searing is the author of West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce (Cambridge University Press, 1993), an account of the slave trade and West African economies, and God Alone Is King: Islam and Emancipation in Senegal (Heinemann Social History of Africa series, 2001), which chronicles the end of slavery.

His current Fulbright research focuses on Gorée Island and another tiny offshore island, Saint Louis, which were bases for slave exportation to the Americas and trade among French merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Searing estimates twelve hundred slaves were exported from Saint Louis each year, with about five hundred exported from Gorée and ports to the south. These figures vary among scholars, though, and Gorée's role as a major slave port is the subject of debate.