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Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition Fellowships 2022-23

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC), part of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, invites applications for its 2022-2023 Fellowship Program. The Center seeks to promote a better understanding of all aspects of the institution of slavery from the earliest times to the present. We welcome proposals that will utilize the special collections of the Yale University Libraries or other research collections of the New England area, and explicitly engage issues of historical slavery, contemporary forced labor, resistance, abolition, and their legacies. Scholars from all disciplines, both established and younger scholars, are encouraged to apply. 

Applicants MUST have received the Ph.D. prior to the beginning of their appointment. This is a residential fellowship and fellows are expected to spend the majority of their time in residence at Yale. The residency requirement is contingent on current public health policies implemented by Yale University, the State of Connecticut, and the fellows’ home institutions. Fellows will be expected to participate in the intellectual life of the GLC and the larger Yale community, and to acknowledge the support of the GLC and the MacMillan Center in publications and lectures that stem from research conducted during the fellowship term. All fellows will be expected to offer one public presentation during their tenure at Yale and to record an audio interview for a podcast.

For academic year 2022-2023, we are offering two categories of fellowships:

  • One-semester (4 months) research fellowships; and
  • The Argiro Fellowship for the Study of Modern Slavery (a 10-month teaching and research fellowship).

For further information and instructions how to apply, visit: https://glc.yale.edu/Fellowships

Highest priority is given to applications that are fully complete by April 1, 2022.

For additional information, please contact:

Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

The MacMillan Center at Yale University

PO Box 208206, New Haven, CT 06520-8206

Email: gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu

Website:              https://glc.yale.edu/Fellowships

PhD scholarship project at the Wilberforce Institute

Maritime Quarantine and Transatlantic Slavery

Application deadline: January 10, 2022

Applications are invited for this PhD scholarship project, working with the renowned Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull, seeking to mine underexplored data within Slave Voyages to analyse what we can learn about maritime solutions in rival European slave trading zones to reduce disease transmission. In the aftermath of COVID 19, such imperative research considers the effectiveness of historic multiracial isolation zones to quarantine diseases, including spaces such as Robben Island in South Africa, slave forts and barracoons along the West Coast of Africa, and the sugar economies in the Caribbean and Latin America. In addition to these land-based strategies for preventing disease transmission, seaborne solutions to curtailing pandemics, both in transit and through floating quarantine in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, will further expand our knowledge of how maritime communities effectively limited transmittable diseases such as cholera, typhus, small pox, and yellow fever in the period of the transatlantic slave trade between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. To broaden the significance of the analysis, a panel of internationally renowned medical, maritime and slavery scholars have also been assembled to support this studentship – thereby ensuring findings have the potential to inform contemporary debates about fighting future disease pandemics.

Apply here

For informal enquiries, please contact Dr Nicholas Evans

Upcoming Symposium: Legacies of Slavery, Racism, and Empire in the History of Medicine

by Christopher Willoughby

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the international symposium “Legacies of Slavery, Racism, and Empire in the History of Medicine” to be held on November 12, 2021. The symposium is organized by the University of Chicago Center in Paris and the CAS laboratory at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France. 

The event will take place online via Zoom on November 12, 2021, from 4pm to 8pm (Paris time)Registrations are now openhttps://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_HB-LQYk9SoOIrgAmA3POcw 

You will be able to find the program of the event via the following weblink: https://humanities-web.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/college/centerinparis-prod/s3fs-public/2021-10/Legacies_prog.pdf 

The detailed abstract and the poster of the event can be found online at https://centerinparis.uchicago.edu/events/legacies-slavery-racism-and-empire-history-medicine 

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns. We look forward to seeing you on November 12th!

With our warm regards,
Elodie Edwards-Grossi (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès)
Christopher D. E. Willoughby (Harvard University and Huntington Library)



Legacies of Slavery, Racism, and Empire in the History of Medicine
12 novembre 2021 – online


For most of the 20th century, historical studies on race and medicine were long considered marginal compared to more traditional work on slave societies or colonial history. However, they have recently experienced a revival, particularly since the 2000s, and a range of books and articles have been published in English and in French. Some shed light on the relationships between the development of slavery in the United States and the emergence of new medical practices and theories used largely by white doctors to treat black bodies on plantations, others focus on experiments conducted on the bodies of the enslaved by white doctors or the use of alternative medical practices and self-administered care by the enslaved and their descendants, during and after slavery, often qualified as illegitimate by the doctors whose science was firmly rooted in the Euro-centric tradition. Some recent works have also dealt with race, medicine and imperial history, both in British and French colonies. This international symposium in English will gather scholars from France and from the United States who are currently working on French imperial history, race and medicine or on the history of slavery in the US and the medical treatment of African-American patients in the 19th and 20th centuries. This one-day event will therefore propose a unique opportunity for French and American academic audiences and students to discuss new contributions in French history, American history and the history of medicine.

Panel 1 – Race, Medicine and Institutional Histories in the US – 4pm to 5:45pm
Respondent: Nathalie Dessens (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès) 

Elodie Edwards-Grossi (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès), “Mad with Freedom: the Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity and Civil Rights in the 19th Century” 

Christopher D. E. Willoughby (Harvard University and Huntington Library), “Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in American Medical Schools” 

Ezelle Sanford III (Carnegie Mellon University), “Segregated Medicine: How Racial Politics Shaped American Healthcare”

Panel 2 – Medical Racism and Empire – 6pm to 7:45pm 
Respondent: Jim Downs (Gettysburg College)

Rana Hogarth (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), “Measuring Miscegenation: Eugenics, Anti-Blackness, and the Legacies of Slavery”

Raphaël Gallien (Université de Paris), “Colonized Madness: an History of the Psychiatric Institution in Madagascar in the Colonial Context (1912-1955)”

Delphine Peiretti-Courtis (Université Aix-Marseille), “Black Bodies and White Doctors: Examining Racial Prejudice in the 19th and 20th Centuries in the French Colonial Empire”

Bonjour,

Nous avons le plaisir de vous convier au colloque « Legacies of Slavery, Racism, and Empire in the History of Medicine » organisé par le centre de l’université de Chicago à Paris et par le laboratoire CAS de l’université Toulouse Jean Jaurès. 

L’évènement aura lieu sur Zoom le 12 novembre prochain, de 16h à 20h. Il est nécessaire de vous inscrire à l’évènement en amont via le lien d’inscription ci-après : https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_HB-LQYk9SoOIrgAmA3POcw 

Vous trouverez le programme ci-après. Le descriptif de l’évènement, l’affiche et le programme sont également disponibles sur la page de l’évènement : https://centerinparis.uchicago.edu/events/legacies-slavery-racism-and-empire-history-medicine 

Au plaisir de vous voir le 12 novembre prochain,

Elodie Edwards-Grossi (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès)
Christopher D. E. Willoughby (Harvard University and Huntington Library)



« Legacies of Slavery, Racism, and Empire in the History of Medicine »
12 novembre 2021 – évènement en ligne


Session 1 – Race, Medicine and Institutional Histories in the US – 16h à 17h45
Discutante : Nathalie Dessens (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès) 

Elodie Edwards-Grossi (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès), “Mad with Freedom: the Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity and Civil Rights in the 19th Century” 

Christopher D. E. Willoughby (Harvard University and Huntington Library), “Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in American Medical Schools” 

Ezelle Sanford III (Carnegie Mellon University), “Segregated Medicine: How Racial Politics Shaped American Healthcare”

Session 2 – Medical Racism and Empire – 18h à 19h45

Discutant : Jim Downs (Gettysburg College)

Rana Hogarth (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), “Measuring Miscegenation: Eugenics, Anti-Blackness, and the Legacies of Slavery”

Raphaël Gallien (Université de Paris), “Colonized Madness: an History of the Psychiatric Institution in Madagascar in the Colonial Context (1912-1955)”

Delphine Peiretti-Courtis (Université Aix-Marseille), “Black Bodies and White Doctors: Examining Racial Prejudice in the 19th and 20th Centuries in the French Colonial Empire”

Contact Email: christopherwilloughby@fas.harvard.edu

Publication: De la Nouvelle-Néerlande à New York, by Anne-Claire Faucquez

L’histoire de la colonie de New York ne peut être dissociée de celle de l’esclavage. En effet, l’esclavage fut implanté dès l’arrivée des premiers colons néerlandais en 1624 et se développa parallèlement à la colonie, s’étendant dans les régions rurales autour de l’île de Manhattan et s’ancrant à tous les niveaux de cette jeune société coloniale. Si le statut de l’esclave n’était pas encore véritablement codifié à l’époque néerlandaise, il le fut progressivement après la conquête anglaise de 1664 jusqu’en 1712, date de la première révolte d’esclaves sur le continent nord-américain. Ce cadre législatif qui liait indéfectiblement le statut servile à la couleur de peau façonna les mentalités et renforça les préjugés raciaux que les colons avaient hérités de la Renaissance. Or, la rigidité de ce cadre ne put se conformer parfaitement à la réalité de l’environnement new-yorkais qui réclamait des esclaves une grande mobilité et une certaine autonomie et qui tolérait, depuis la période néerlandaise, la présence d’une communauté de Noirs libres, laquelle permit de conforter les esclaves dans leur volonté de s’affirmer culturellement et de résister à leur condition. Ainsi l’esclavage fut loin d’être cette « institution particulière » chère au Sud mais était répandu sur l’ensemble du territoire américain depuis ses origines.

Seeking Freedom: The Underground Railroad in the Mid-Atlantic

From H-Atlantic, June 2, 2021

Lincoln University and Voices Underground 2021 CFP

Lincoln University, Pennsylvania

March 31, April 1-2, 2022

The Lincoln University Center for the Study of the Underground Railroad and Voices Underground, an organization focused on preserving and sharing the Underground Railroad’s story, welcomes proposals for its inaugural 2022 conference, Seeking Freedom: The Underground Railroad in the Mid-Atlantic. The conference will take place at Lincoln University on March 31, April 1-2, 2022.

We welcome proposals from all fields and disciplines, from historians, preservationists, independent scholars, social scientists, community leaders, undergraduate, and graduate students. Of particular interest are the lower eastern middle states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and southern New York.  We encourage individuals who are researching sites of memory, the role of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) such as Lincoln University and Cheyney University, and the importance of the free and enslaved African American community through the end of the Civil War to submit. We also desire papers that explore any or all the diverse complexities of the UGRR, including known and unknown physical sites (homes, corridors, routes) and those that extract the voices of the unheard, invisible, and underrated. As such, we welcome research that demythologizes the story and memory of the UGRR. Individuals may also suggest and write on topics that are not listed if the subject falls within this symposium’s overall theme. The following list provides possible areas of inquiry.

  • African Agency
  • Architecture
  • Biographies
  • Community Organizing
  • Economy
  • Law in the 19th century
  • Literature
  • Politics
  • Propaganda
  • Preservation
  • Religious Institutions
  • Resistance and Violence
  • Spirituals/Songs
  • Women in the UGRR

The organizing committee will consider individual papers, panels, and roundtables. Panels and roundtables must designate or suggest a commentator and moderator separate from the presenters. Each participant will be allotted twenty minutes to present.

Proposals for panels and roundtables should include a brief session description (one to two pages), the theme, a 300-word maximum abstract for each participant’s paper, and a short bio (200 words max) of each participant including the moderator, chair and/or commentator. Proposals for individual presentations should also include a 300-word abstract and a short bio (200 words max). All submissions should include each person’s C.V. or résumé (5-page max) including contact information (complete mailing address, the institution or organization’s name (if applicable), an email address, and phone number). Please use the following link to submit. https://www.lincoln.edu/lincoln-university-and-voices-underground-railroad-conference-submission-form

Participants are responsible for their own lodging and transportation. 

Priority will be given to prospective participants who submit by October 15, 2021. After this date, the committee will review submissions on a rolling basis. We plan to announce the acceptance of regular submissions by December 15, 2021. 

Inquiries can be sent to ugrrconference@lincoln.edu

For further information please visit https://www.lincoln.edu/ugrrconference           

Convening Committee:

Dr. Nafeesa Muhammad 

Professor of History                                              

Lincoln University, PA

nmuhammad@lincoln.edu

Dr. Gregory Thompson

Executive Director | Voices Underground

greg@vuproject.org

www.vuproject.org

Dr. Paul Finkelman

President

Gratz College

pfinkelman@gratz.edu

Contact Info:  Dr. Nora Lynn Gardner at ugrrconference@lincoln.edu 

Contact Email: ugrrconference@lincoln.edu

URL: https://www.lincoln.edu/ugrrconference

LeBlanc on Ogborn, ‘The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World’ by H-Net Reviews

Miles Ogborn. The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. x + 309 pp. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-226-65768-4; $105.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-65592-5. 

Reviewed by Dylan LeBlanc (La Lumiere School) Published on H-Atlantic (May, 2021) Commissioned by Bryan Rindfleisch (Marquette University) 

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55712

The Stakes and Sounds of Talk in Atlantic Slavery

This book is a crafty reinterpretation of the spaces of Atlantic slavery as soundscapes of power. In general, Miles Ogborn argues that “talk”—the aggregate and discrete dynamics of speech and speaking—both reinforced and had the potential to undermine slave societies. Much of the book develops the distinct dimensions of “talk” as an analytical category, one that helps reveal and explain many of the more subtle yet salient aspects of white supremacy and organized violence that defined Atlantic slavery. In this sense, Ogborn joins a number of important works that have rethought slavery through vital themes: for example, Vincent Brown’s view of slavery and death (The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery [2008]), Terri L. Snyder’s deconstruction of suicide (The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America [2015]), Kevin Dawson’s study of “acquatic culture” in the African diaspora (Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora [2021]), and Neil Roberts’s interpretation of “freedom as marronnage” (Freedom as Marronage [2015]). And Ogborn adds another interpretive tool to which historians might turn as they examine slavery’s myriad contexts, which itself is a valuable contribution.

A geographer by training, Ogborn is attuned from the outset to “the relationship between speech and space” and the “microgeographies of speech.” This leads him to consider the ways talking is local and to reconstruct when possible the “courtrooms, taverns, and parlors, as well as the coffeehouses, parliaments, and doorways” in which speech took place, the “words spoken in confidence, overheard through windows, or stated out in the fields in front of everyone” (p. 20). It is in this context of slavery that talk always conveyed politics and power relations charged with racialized violence, and claims to domination or claims to freedom. Further, in considering the enslaved populations of Barbados and Jamaica, Ogborn charts a new course between two common interpretive emphases in the historiography: on the one hand, silences enforced through oppression and, on the other, “the astonishing and inventive proliferation of creolized sonic forms,” such as creole languages, folk music, and the voices of enslaved preachers (p. 28). Herein lies an important contribution. Ogborn’s sounds almost always arise in moments of encounter between the enslaved and the enslaver, humanizing and animating both in insightful ways. In Ogborn’s terms, “who can speak and what they might say is a crucial question for the history of slavery in the Caribbean,” and this emphasis on possibility, on ability, involves a critical grappling with the structures of movement, thought, and agency at the points where the oppressed and the oppressor met (p. 34).

The book is organized in five chapters, with a meditative introduction and conclusion. Though Ogborn does speak to change over time in some areas, the structure is mostly thematic, which will perhaps enhance its usefulness and adaptability as an interpretive tool with which to approach other contexts of Atlantic slavery. Ogborn begins with oaths as a window into understanding the dynamics of talk in slave societies. The act of giving one’s word was fundamental to Anglo-European legal regimes for centuries and the English were no different when first colonizing the Caribbean, but as Ogborn describes, the presence of a racialized and enslaved population changed the stakes and the meanings of oath taking in the Caribbean. In law, only free white men could make oaths and give evidence in court, thereby excluding the voices of the enslaved and raising troubling questions about the need for enslaved testimony in criminal investigations. Further, the negotiations regarding oaths sometimes became as important as the commitments one made when giving an oath. For this, Ogborn turns to the treaties that heralded an end to the Maroon Wars that raged in Jamaica throughout the 1730s. On the British side, the conflict ended and the Maroons gained conditional freedom by treaty; the Maroons, however, insisted that the British also engaged in an oath-taking ritual that the Maroons recognized as binding: a mingling and drinking of blood and rum. By consenting to “swallow the oath,” the British in their negotiations with the Maroons participated in a legal and cultural form that harkened back to similar oath-taking practices in some west African societies (p. 47). Ogborn elaborates with his descriptions of such practices among the Asante peoples and discusses Edward Long’s own treatment of “Coromantin” oaths, elements of which the Maroons might have carried on.

Ogborn’s subsequent analyses echo many of the core themes evoked in the study of oaths. In chapter 2, “The Deliberative Voice: Politics, Speech, and Liberty,” for example, Ogborn adds a new wrinkle to the now canonical understanding that slavery heightened the sensitivity of white colonists to their own prerogatives and liberty. Interpreting the often indignant approach of the Jamaican assembly to relations with Whitehall in the light of colonial paranoia regarding slave rebellion, Ogborn writes: “Freeborn Englishmen … would never be slaves if they spoke out to defend their liberties. This view, in turn, shaped the ways in which the voices of the enslaved were heard and misheard as they discussed and protested slavery’s violent oppressions” (p. 105). In investigations of supposed conspiracies, Jamaican slaveholders wanted to demonstrate that the enslaved had in fact conspired, that they had used the “deliberative voice” proper to political action (in assemblies and the like) to plot against their enslavement. White colonists thereby stubbornly asserted their own liberties and the speech practices they used onto the actions of the enslaved, whose speech practices they never fully understood, which created a tense environment of mutual suspicion and resentment. Among the enslaved, this mishearing or selective hearing was often paid for in blood.

While Ogborn relies much on the tensions between the enslaved and the colonial regime in Jamaica and Barbados in his early chapters, later chapters include more elements of collaboration and exchange through speech across black and white communities. In the realm of botany, for example, talk about the medical value of plants between the enslaved and free helped produce botanical and medical knowledge. Ogborn relates instances in which the enslaved healed ailing planters, accompanied amateur botanists like Thomas Thistlewood on foraging expeditions in the woods, or contributed to the development of early botanical gardens on the sugar islands. A similar process of exchange through talk occurred in the spiritual domain, in which the proselytizing work of both Anglicans and non-conformists in the Caribbean hinged on speaking with the enslaved. In religion, however, talk was often less useful than in botany. For instance, Ogborn employs the reflections of the Moravian missionary Zacharias George Caries to illustrate the collaboration but also ambiguity of slave society speech, as Caries bemoaned the fact that the enslaved could “imitate our language without feeling it in their heart” (p. 163). In this way, speech and talk evoked the ultimate incommensurability of the enslaver and enslaved worlds in the Caribbean. Hardened racial attitudes, even among those British who never stepped foot in a slave society, often rendered the enslaved permanent “others,” no matter what kind of speech they spoke. Ogborn’s interpretation of the free black Jamaican poet Francis Williams illustrates this well. Whereas Williams drew a distinction between a “white negro” and a “black negro” on the basis of speech, David Hume considered Williams a “parrot,” unable to comprehend black eloquence even within European aesthetic paradigms. 

The range of topics that Ogborn details all hang together under the framework of talk-as-power, with power understood as multidirectional, leaving even the most oppressed a modicum of agency to seize the means of shaping the world around them. For the enslaved in places like Jamaica, the most ubiquitous and iconic of these means, aside from violent resistance and rebellion, was linked closely to speech in the practice of obeah. Turning to the rituals, spells, incantations, and protections that black practitioners of obeah used, the enslaved might undermine slave society—for they certainly saw it this way. But as Ogborn recognizes, drawing on the important work of Diana Paton on the meanings of obeah in the age of European “enlightenment” (The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity in the Caribbean World [2015]), from the planter perspective, much of obeah was just words, even if it still worried them: for “obeah’s orality [was] both everything and nothing” (p. 160). In much of the book, then, Ogborn maximizes this ambiguity of speech practices in slave societies to useful effect.

Throughout the book, Ogborn also confronts the evidentiary problem at the core of all studies of slavery: the systems of power and violence designed to keep people in bondage but who also conspired to obscure many of the traces that the enslaved left behind on their own terms. Ogborn’s solution is less about “reading against the grain” or “between the lines” or “listening for silences” as it is about identifying traces of speech left in plain sight, or reading old sources in new ways. In general, Ogborn succeeds in revealing the many ways speech demarcated lines between freedom and slavery, and how talking blurred or crossed these lines with great frequency. He deconstructs an eclectic mix of topics to do this—oaths, formal politics, botany and medicine, spiritual practices—through sources that, for the most part, will not be new to historians who have worked on Jamaica and the Anglo-Caribbean. Long’s History of Jamaica (1774) and Long’s papers in the British Library, for example, do a significant amount of the evidentiary lifting for Ogborn in some chapters. However, Ogborn’s heavy reliance on theory, and at times tedious rendition of the theoretical literature, might frustrate some readers. The book devotes almost as much space to discussing other people’s arguments as it does to Ogborn’s own evidence. For example, the work of Bruno Latour is discussed in each chapter and to excessive depth, and with often greater critical attention than Ogborn pays to the richness (and fraught complexity) of Long’s writings.

Historians will without a doubt take inspiration from Ogborn’s method and interpretation of “talk,” and future studies of the sonic dimensions of the Atlantic world will follow his cues. As a work situated within the historiography of Atlantic slavery, however, the flexibility of Ogborn’s category “talk” does perhaps less original work than it claims to. The book’s thematic organization means that Ogborn addresses a slightly different dimension of talk and speech in each chapter, but orality in most cases tends only to reveal the fundamental power dynamics of slavery that historians already understand well. Talk and speech may very well be one of the most effective frameworks through which to study slavery, perhaps better than most frameworks, but Ogborn does not spend much time effectively making this case. Indeed, in the conclusion he writes that this “book does not claim that the history of slavery can be reduced to a history of orality, but considering talk as practice, or as many differentiated practices, can offer a way of rethinking that history” (p. 233). This is fair enough as a claim but also represents a missed opportunity. Too often the reader is left making extrapolations and connections between the many “differentiated practices” of talk between the chapters and/or case studies through implication rather than by following an overarching specific argument. In other words, what Ogborn reveals about the world of Atlantic slavery itself might only go as deep as the reader’s own prior knowledge of that world, and those revelations may not always be made apparent in the book. It seems plausible, then, that Ogborn might have developed a stronger “through-line” of argument about talk in Caribbean slave societies while also avoiding reducing slavery to mere orality.

Citation: Dylan LeBlanc. Review of Ogborn, Miles, The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World. H-Atlantic, H-Net Reviews. May, 2021. 

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55712

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

Job: Post Doctorate Research Associate

University of Liverpool

Centre for the Study of International Slavery

Postdoctoral Research Associate (0.6 fte) – Grade 7

Humanities & Social Sciences

025379

£34,805 – £40,322 pa (pro rata)

Closing date: 06-Apr-2021 23:30


The Centre for the Study for International Slavery is seeking to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Associate as Programme Manager to support its ambitious programme of events, networks and grants which are delivered locally, nationally and internationally. You will be responsible for coordinating communication, funding opportunities and events, while also supporting the strategic development of a Delivery Plan for the Centre. You will report to the University of Liverpool Co-Director of CSIS with support from the Faculty Research and Impact Team as well as a wider network of professional services support from the Research Partnerships and Innovation Directorate. There may be opportunity for the advertised FTE to be increased as the programme develops. The post is available on a fixed term basis, for 3 years.


Closing date 6 April 21 at 23:30

Seeking panelists for AHA 2022: “Slavery and Sexual Economies in the Atlantic World”

 From H-Atlantic, March 1, 2021

We are seeking to put a panel together for the 2022 AHA on the sexual economy of slavery in the Atlantic World (broadly construed) from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Currently, one paper will analyze sex and plantation management in nineteenth-century Martinique and another will examine the urban sexual economy and enslaved prostitution in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. To complete the panel, we are looking for two more papers that explore sex, slavery, and the economy from any region in the North or South Atlantic. We are also seeking a scholar who would be interested in serving as panel chair and commentator. 

If interested, please send a paper title and short (300 word) abstract by March 1, 2021 to Deirdre Lyons at dtl412@uchicago.edu 

Contact Email: dtl412@uchicago.edu

CFP Sugar and Slaves

50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PUBLICATION OF RICHARD S. DUNN’S SUGAR AND SLAVES: THE RISE OF THE PLANTER CLASS IN THE ENGLISH WEST INDIES, 1624-1713

2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the foundational books in the writing of Caribbean and Atlantic history. Richard S. Dunn’s highly evocative work opened up an entire field of study. Since its publication, historians have both deepened our understanding of subjects first developed in Dunn’s work and, inspired by Dunn’s scholarship, turned to new topics entirely.

We call on scholars with an interest and expertise in the areas covered by Sugar and Slaves to submit proposals for selection as papers to be presented at a workshop (held remotely) in summer 2021, tentatively scheduled for June 28-29. Papers should engage the period and region of Dunn’s study—the seventeenth-century Caribbean—while showcasing innovative scholarship and new directions in the field. Our ambition is that some of these papers will be published in a special issue of Early American Studies in 2022, and these essays will need to be ready for submission for peer review at the journal by August 15, 2021. 

Anyone interested in making a proposal along the lines indicated above should send a 500-word proposal and brief cv to Alison Games (gamesa@georgetown.edu) and Trevor Burnard (t.g.burnard@hull.ac.uk) by 15 March 2021. We will be in touch about details of a workshop on Sugar and Slaves by 1 April 2021. Contact Email: gamesa@georgetown.edu