Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (born 27 June 1929) is a prominent historian and public intellectual who focuses on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, Louisiana (United States), Africa, and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Discovering extensive French and Spanish colonial documents related to the slave trade in Louisiana, she wrote Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992), studied the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans brought to Louisiana, as well as the process of creolization which created new cultures. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched and taught, adding to scholarly understanding of the diverse origins of cultures throughout the Americas.

In addition, Midlo Hall created a database of records identifying and describing more than 100,000 enslaved Africans. It has become a primary resource for historical and genealogical research. She earned recognition in academia, and has been featured in the New York Times, People Magazine, ABC News, BBC, and other popular outlets for her contributions to scholarship, genealogy, and the critical reevaluation of the history of slavery.

Midlo Hall is an award-winning author and Professor Emerita of Latin American and Caribbean History, Rutgers University, New Jersey. Since 2010 she is Professor of History at Michigan State University.

Gwendolyn Midlo was born June 27, 1929 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Ethel and Herman Lazard Midlo, a civil rights and labor attorney. Her parents were of Russian- and Polish-Jewish ancestry. She was influenced by her father's activism. In 1990 her mother founded the Ethel and Herman Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans, where her father had donated his papers.

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