Gene Dattel, a cultural and economic historian, grew up in the majority-black cotton country of the Mississippi Delta. He was educated at Yale University and Vanderbilt University Law School. He then embarked on a twenty-year career in global finance as a managing director at Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley, spending a majority of his career overseas in London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. His first book The Sun that Never Rose presciently outlined Japan’s long term structural economic problems when conventional wisdom predicted an unassailable economic juggernaut.

He also has served as an advisor to major cultural institutions from The New York Historical Society to The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. His book Cotton and Race in the Making of America describes the fateful intersection of cotton’s economic power to the African American experience.

Mr. Dattel lectures widely at universities, museums, and public forums across the country, has sponsored research projects on the art and music of the Mississippi Delta, and produced a documentary on the race riots in the north.

Co-sponsored by the Africana Studies & Research Center and by the departments of Classics and History.