November 19, 2020 12:30 - 2:00 pm Thabisile Griffin, PhD Candidate, UCLA "Black Militias in the Era of Revolutions: Politics, Race and Labor" From 1781 to 1790, the British Caribbean military and colonial administrators struggled with renegotiating their racial truth systems - through a recalibration of defense. The last two decades of the century were […]
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This presentation centers on the story of Abba, an enslaved woman who was the mother of an unusually large family in eighteenth century Jamaica. Abba had been pregnant thirteen times. She had ten live births and one still birth. We come to know Abba’s story through the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, notorious among scholars of […]
This talk has been POSTPONED. Future date TBD. This talk considers the process of writing about the life and work of the Caribbean philosophe Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819). A lawyer, printer, naturalist, and translator who was at the forefront of revolutionary politics on two continents, Moreau was also a slaveholder who wrote about ideals of liberty even as […]
Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, Vasco da Gama Assistant Professor of History and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University "East Atlantic Crossings in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries" Atlantic historians tend to understand transoceanic crossings along an east-west axis, with people and goods seen as traversing the space between Africa and/or Europe, on the one hand, […]
Barbara Krauthamer, Professor of History, UMass Amherst "Liberty’s Diaspora: Black Women in the Age of the American Revolution" This presentation examines the lives of three Black women who had been enslaved in the British North American colonies at the time of the American Revolution. The presentation reflects on their lives by considering the ways historians have […]
Elizabeth Schiffler, PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies, UCLA "Snow Eggs: Situated Tastes and Partial Archives" This talk traces a history of Snow Eggs, from its inception in American gastronomic history to a contemporary Los Angeles performance. Beginning with the recipe from 18th century Chef James Hemings, enslaved to President Jefferson, a study of […]
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Alea Adigweme, MFA student in Interdisciplinary Studio Art at UCLA Zoom - Click here to register for the event.
In this presentation I explore how the dense vectors of material culture and spirit possession established in the crucible of the modern era continue to inform the decisions of millions of west Africans as they navigate everyday realities at home and abroad. In the first half of this talk, I explore emerging themes in “fetish […]
October 18, 5 pm Mario Biagioli (UCLA Law and Information Studies) (please note the later time) This paper moves from the recent findings of agnotologists (like the book Merchants of Doubt) about the post-WWII strategy by tobacco and oil companies to cast doubt about the scientific evidence concerning, respectively, the risks of tobacco smoking and the existence […]
