KAROLYN SMARDZ FROST - Symposium Organizer

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From 2013-2016, Karolyn Smardz Frost was a Harrison McCain Visiting Professor at Acadia. Both an archaeologist and an historian, she is also the Senior Research Fellow for African Canadian History at York University’s Harriet Tubman Institute. Karolyn lives in Wolfville and specializes in teaching primary research methods that illuminate our nation’s rich African Canadian heritage.

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Her current research project is entitled Planting Slavery in Nova Scotia’s Promised Land. She also has a particular interest in the White and Oliver families and their long relationship with Acadia University. Karolyn’s landmark biography of fugitive slaves Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad (2007) won the coveted Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

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Her most recent co-edited volume, A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland (2016), showcases new research on African Canadian/African American transnationalism to support a UNESCO World Heritage Site bid for the Detroit River. In January 2017, she will be launching her new freedom-seeker biography, Steal Away Home: Letters to a Fugitive Slave.

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