Benjamin Talton was appointed director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, located in Founders Library at Howard University, houses one of the most comprehensive collections of African-American, African, and Africana history and memorabilia found anywhere in the world. The center houses hundreds of thousands of pamphlets, books, periodicals, photographs, personal papers, manuscripts, music, artifacts, and other materials documenting the history, culture, and experiences of Black people in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States and other parts of the world. What began in the early years of Howard University as a small collection of antislavery books and pamphlets is now one of the world’s premier centers for the study of the Black experience.
A historian of Africa and the African diaspora, Dr. Talton joins Howard University following a 20-year career in the academy, including, most recently, at Temple University, where he was a professor of history. A highly respected author, Dr. Talton’s publications include three books: The Politics of Social Change in Ghana: The Konkomba Struggle for Political Equality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Black Subjects in Africa and its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), which he wrote with Quincy Mills of the University of Maryland, College Park; and, most recently, In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association.
Dr. Talton earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Howard University. He holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago.
