DR. KEITH MICHAEL GREEN

Biography

Keith Michael Green is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Rutgers University–Camden. His scholarship examines African American writing, captivity, freedom, disability, multilingualism, and the circulation of Black cultural expression across national boundaries.

A Camden High School alumnus, Green connects literary scholarship with questions of racial justice and the recovery of lives that conventional historical accounts have overlooked. His work considers how autobiographical writing records forms of confinement and how those records can challenge familiar accounts of slavery, emancipation, and freedom.

Contributions to BGHRA

Green’s connection to BGHRA’s founder and president, Dr. Rosemarie Peña, began well before the association made its home at Rutgers–Camden. He was a critical mentor when Peña returned to Rutgers in 2008 to study German, supporting her throughout her graduate studies until she earned her Ph.D. During his tenure as chair of Africana Studies, BGHRA became established at Rutgers, and the idea for the Black German and Adoption Studies Special Collection took root. His mentorship and institutional support have helped shape both Peña’s scholarly journey and BGHRA’s enduring relationship with the university.

As BGHRA’s Executive Director of Events & Publications, Green supports conference planning, campus engagement, and publication initiatives. He helps connect BGHRA’s transatlantic work with Africana Studies at Rutgers–Camden, bringing university resources and community knowledge into conversation.

His work with BGHRA is featured among the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice’s research projects. Explore BGHRA’s international conferences and 2027 conference and Special Collection launch.

Projects & Areas of Practice

• Saved but Enslaved. Research on Briton Hammon, Hannah Hovey, and early Black and Indigenous members of Plymouth’s First Church, using estate and church records to investigate slavery and religious life in colonial New England. Read the Rutgers project description.
• Black Transnationalism & Amistad Conversations. Cross-campus work connecting Black history scholarship with education in New Jersey. Explore the initiative.

Selected Publications & Digital Scholarship

• Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage, 1816–1861 (University of Alabama Press, 2015). Recipient of the Elizabeth Agee Prize. Book overview.
• Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages (Routledge, 2019), co-edited with Sarada Balagopalan and Cati Coe. Publication record.
• “Langston Hughes’s Translingual Poetics and Pedagogy,” in Langston Hughes in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 115–128. Chapter details.

Presentations, Interviews & Media

• Rutgers Researcher Explores Slave Narratives in Forthcoming Book. Rutgers feature on the research behind Bound to Respect.
• Research and public scholarship profile. Rutgers Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.
• Research with Rutgers. Additional publications and research interests.