8th Annual Meeting of the Minds Symposium - Guest Speaker Reception

Tyler D. Parry is Associate Professor of African American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Trained as a historian, he received his BA in 2008 from the University of Nevada Las Vegas and his Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of South Carolina. He co-edits H-Afro-Am, a premier venue that digitally links scholars who study the African American experience, and serves as the Book Review Editor for Black Perspectives, a leading blog housed under the African American Intellectual History Society. Parry’s research examines slavery in the Americas and the African diaspora. His writings are published in the Journal of Southern History, American Studies, Journal of Global Slavery, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, History Today, Griot’s Republic, Jacobin.com, Black Perspectives, The Washington Post, and various edited collections. His first book manuscript, Jumping the Broom: A Multicultural History, examines how marriage traditions were exchanged and transmitted by different cultural groups in the Atlantic world. It is currently under review at the University of North Carolina Press. Concurrently, he is co-authoring a book with Charlton Yingling of the University of Louisville, tentatively titled (White) Man’s Best Friend: Slave Hounds and Power in the Americas, which examines the transatlantic use of canines to attack and subordinate black bodies during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. 

Dr. Parry's research argues that canines were integral in the colonization of the Americas and the development of plantation slavery in the Western Hemisphere. He is specifically interested in examining the legacies of inter-species violence from slavery to freedom and their modern use in controlling and intimidating marginalized populations