plovejoy@yorku.ca
As Distinguished Research Professor the Department of History, York University, he was Founding Director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University and held the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History (2000-2015). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was a member of Council of the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, serving as Vice President and Acting President. He was a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO “Slave Route” Project from 1996 to 2012, publishing several books in association with the Project. He was co-editor of the journal, African Economic History, for 37 years and continues as General Editor of The Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora (Africa World Press), having published 40 books in the Series. In 2019, the Journal of Global Slavery and Brill Publishers established the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize, an Annual Award for Excellence and Originality in a Major Work on Global Slavery. In 2021, African Economic History published a special issue in his honor (Vol, 49, No. 1), and in 2024, Toyin Falola published Transformations in History: African Societies and Economies in The Works of Paul Lovejoy (Berlin and Leiden: De Gruyter Brill). He also received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Extraordinary Global Academic Leadership from Obafemi Awolowo University *the Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association in 2024. Lovejoy has published more than forty books, including Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (1775-1850) (2016), Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa (2019), Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: An Enslaved Muslim of the Black Atlantic (2025), and Ecología, etnografía y comercio musulmán a través del Sahel: interacciones entre el Sahara, la sabana y el bosque en África Occidental (2025). He has co-edited Slavery, Resistance and Abolitions: A Pluralist Perspective (2019), The Atlantic and Africa: The Second Slavery and Beyond (2021), Regenerated Identities: Documenting African Lives (2022), and Boko Haram, Islamic Protest and National Security (2023). His various web-based projects include Equiano’s World: Gustavus Vassa and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (www.equianosworld.org), which is the subject of his current research. His forthcoming book, Olaudah of Ikwuano: The True Origins of an African Abolitionist is being published by Princeton University Press.
Research keywords: African Economic History, Islamic Africa, slavery, biography, African diaspora