Speaker Bios

Speaker Bios:

Carlos Aguirre is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. He is the author five books on slavery and abolition, punishment, prisons, and intellectuals. His most recent book is a study of the early intellectual and literary career of Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. He is also editor or co-editor of eight volumes on various topics. He is currently completing a book on intellectuals and print culture in twentieth-century Peru and is working on a study of intellectuals and military nationalism in Peru from 1968 to 1975.

George Reid Andrews is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has taught since 1981. His publications include The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800-1900 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2004), Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), and Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600-2000 (Harvard University Press, 2016).

Ana Lucia Araujo is a historian and Full Professor in the Department of History at Howard University. Her work explores the history, memory, heritage, and visual culture of slavery. She is the author of Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery (2014) and Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (2010). In 2015, she published Brazil Through the French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics with University of New Mexico Press, a revised and expanded version of her book Romantisme tropical: l’aventure illustrée d’un peintre français au Brésil (2008). She also edited a number of books in the field of history and memory of slavery. Her current book project is a transnational and comparative history of reparations for slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.

Alice Baumgartner is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, whose research focuses on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Her dissertation examines the thousands of American slaves who escaped to Mexico during the nineteenth century and the ways in which their story revises our understandings of the Civil War. Her Louis Pelzer Award–winning article “The Line of Positive Safety: Borders and Boundaries in the Rio Grande Valley, 1848–1880” appeared in the March 2015 issue of the Journal of American History.

Herman L. Bennett is a Professor in the Ph. D. Program in History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Some of his most notable publications include: “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the ‘History’ of the Black Atlantic,” African Studies Review, (2000); Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 15701640, (2003); “‘Sons of Adam’: Text, Context, and the Early Modern African Subject,” Representations, (2005); “Writing into a Void: Slavery, History and Representing Blackness in Latin America,” Social Text, (2007) Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico, (2009). He just completed a new book entitled, Soiled Gods: Africans & Sovereign Power in the Early Atlantic (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press)

Peter Blanchard is Professor Emeritus of the Department of History, University of Toronto, where he taught Latin American History for 37 years. He is the author of The Origins of the Peruvian Labor Movement, 1883-1919; Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru; and Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America, as well as several articles that have appeared in journals and edited collections.

David W. Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale.

Alex Borucki is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California Irvine. He is the author of From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Río de la Plata (University of New Mexico Press). He is the author of Abolitionism and slave trade in Montevideo after independence (Abolicionismo y tráfico de esclavos en Montevideo tras la fundación republicana, 2009) and coauthor of Slavery and Labor: A study on Afro-Uruguayans in the frontiers (Esclavitud y trabajo: Un estudio sobre los afrodescendientes en la frontera uruguaya, 2004).  He published articles in the American Historical Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, Colonial Latin American Review, Itinerario, and Slavery and Abolition.

Alejandra Dubcovsky is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. Her forthcoming book, tentatively titled “Colonial Communication, Networks of Information in the American South from Pre-Contact to 1740” (Harvard University Press), focuses on the acquisition and transmission of news in a pre-postal, pre-printing press colonial world.

Marcela Echeverri is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in Anthropology and Political Theory. She received her PhD in Latin American and Caribbean History from New York University (NYU) in 2008, and taught at the City University of New York (CUNY) before joining Yale in 2013. She has written about Anthropology, gender, and nationalism in mid-twentieth century Colombia; slavery and the law in the Spanish empire; and the history of Indian and black royalists in Latin America’s independence wars. Her research and teaching interests focus on the relationship between political subjectivities and social transformation in Latin America from colonial times to the present.

Anne Eller is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at Yale University. She received her degree in history of the African Diaspora and Latin America from NYU; her dissertation received the Dean’s prize for outstanding dissertation in the humanities, 2011-2012.  Her forthcoming manuscript focuses on the reoccupation of the Dominican Republic by Spain in 1861 and the popular anti-colonial fight that followed. 

Roquinaldo Ferreira is Vasco da Gama Associate Professor in the History Department and the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Department at Brown University. Ferreira received his PhD in African History from UCLA in 2003. Before coming to Brown in 2013, he taught at the University of Virginia (2005-2012). He specializes in African, Colonial Brazilian, and Atlantic History. He has been a visiting Professor at the Institut de Hautes Études Internationales et du Développement, Geneva, and has held a visiting appointment at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He has lectured widely in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). He is the author of Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 275pps.

Ada Ferrer is Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. She is author Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (UNC, 1999), which appeared in French and Spanish translation in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Her new book, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which was published by Cambridge in 2014, won the Friedrich Katz, James Rawley, and Wesley-Logan book prizes from the American Historical Association and is a finalist for this year’s Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale.

Alejandro E. Gómez holds a doctorate from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His principal areas of research include socio-racial issues, revolutionary conflicts, and the study of sensitivities in the Greater Caribbean and the Atlantic World. He is currently a Maître de Conférences of Colonial Spanish America at the University Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3.

A native of Northern Ireland, John Harris completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history at Queen’s University Belfast. He became interested in the transatlantic slave trade during his master’s studies, when he attended the Gilder Lehrman-sponsored “Closing of the Slave trades” conference hosted by Queen’s in May 2008. His interest piqued, a few months later he had completed a national awarding winning thesis on the illegal nineteenth century voyage of the American slaver Echo. After finishing this project John crossed the Atlantic himself. He spent three years working at the College of Charleston as an archivist and digital librarian and in 2011 he entered the history PhD program at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently writing his dissertation on the U.S. involvement in the illegal slave trade in the nineteenth century. From that work emerges his paper today: “Circuits of Wealth, Circuits of Sorrow: Financing the Illegal Transatlantic Slave Trade to Cuba, 1850-1867.

Bayo Holsey is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Her work examines the public history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in West Africa and the African diaspora. She is the author of Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana, which won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology and the Association for Third World Studies’ Toyin Falola Africa Book Award. Currently, she is completing two book projects: Tyrannies of Freedom: Race, Power, and the Fictions of Late Capitalism and The King’s Speech: Narrating Anticolonialism in Black Atlantic Thought, in progress.

Richard Huzzey is senior lecturer in History at the University and author of Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Cornell, 2012). He is a member and former director the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, a collaboration between his university and the International Slavery Museum. Richard is currently researching and writing a new history of British anti-slavery, c. 1787-1838.

Rafael Marquese graduated in History from the University of São Paulo in 1993, where he earned his MA (1997) and doctorate (2001). He has been Professor, Department of History, since 2003. His research focuses on the issue of black slavery in the Americas. He currently participates in two projects of collective research. In the first study, funded by The Getty Foundation and titled “The World of the Plantation and the World the Plantations Made: the ‘Great House Tradition’ in the American Landscape,” investigates, with a US researcher and two Cubans, the landscape and plantation architecture in three core areas of slave production in the world-economy of the nineteenth century (Lower Mississippi Valley, western Cuba and the Paraíba Valley). The second, “The foundation of the state and the nation: Brazil, c.1780-c.1850”, deals with the politics of slavery in Cuba and Brazil between 1790 and 1850. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of History (USP) and the Magazine Almanack Brasiliense (IEB-USP).

Edward Rugemer is Associate Professor of African American Studies & History at Yale University. His first book The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2008) won the Avery Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians for the most original book on the Civil War era, and the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research by a junior faculty member at Yale. The book was also co-winner of the Francis B. Simkins Award of the Southern Historical Association for the best first book in southern history. His second research project, tentatively entitled The Politics of Atlantic Slavery: Jamaica and South Carolina from the Seventeenth Century to 1838, will be a comparative history of Jamaica and South Carolina from their similar origins in the expansion of England’s empire to 1838, when slavery ended in Jamaica and South Carolina became a center of the defense of slavery.

Stuart Schwartz is George Burton Adams Professor of History. He specializes in the History of colonial Latin America, especially Brazil and on the history of Early Modern expansion. Among his books are Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil (1973), Early Latin America (1983), Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985), Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels (1992), as editor, A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil (1979), Implicit Understandings (1994), Victors And Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (2000), Cambridge History Of Native Peoples Of The Americas. South America (1999), and All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008). Most recently, he published Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (2015).

Dale Tomich is Professor of Sociology and History and Deputy Director of Binghamton University’s Fernand Braudel Center. His work focuses on Atlantic slavery and world-economy.

Justin Wolfe is Associate Professor and William Arceneaux Professor of Latin American History at Tulane University. He is the author of The Everyday Nation-State: Community and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua and the co-editor of the collection Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place. He is currently at work on a project that explores the intersection of race and empire in the age of U.S. Manifest Destiny through a rich microhistory of Caribbean Nicaragua and a larger-scale history of the African-descent contribution to Nicaraguan history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.