Keith Griffler is the Director of the Division of Transnational Studies. He joined the department in 2005, coming from the University of Cincinnati where he was Associate Professor of African American Studies. 
        His research and teaching span a broad range of topics in the history and political economy of Africa and its diaspora. His current book project, Common Bonds of the African World: Race and Class in the Age of the Transnational State, chronicles the shared history of oppression within slavery in the Americas and colonialism in Africa to make the case that a theoretically rigorous political economy of the modern world emerges only from an in depth account of the history of the global working class. In taking the vantage point of the nonindustrial workers subjugated by the transnational state, it inverts the history of modernity. Far from the inexorable global penetration of freedom, liberal democracy, civil society and the free market and free labor, it featured the expansion and ultimate dominance of the allegedly premodern, precapitalist, condition of bondage. 
         Professor Griffler is also author of two previous books: What Price Alliance? Black Radicals Confront White Labor, 1918-1938, which traces the African American initiative behind the formation of the historic African American-labor alliance that took shape during the Great Depression; and Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley, a history of the African American front line communities in the port cities and towns along the Ohio which gave the impetus for the formation and growth of the region's underground freedom movement. 
         Professor Griffler co-wrote, co-produced and co-directed a historical documentary, "Wade in the Water," which looks at the journeys of fugitive slaves traveling through the Ohio Valley. The documentary won a number of national awards, including first place in the National Broadcasting Society's National Professional Production category in 2002. He serves on the Advisory Board of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. His work has been funded by a Charles Phelps Taft Fellowship and a major grant from the Ohio Historical Society. 

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For more on Professor Griffler, read the profile in the UB Reporter