Fall 2023

Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar: Aldair Rodrigues, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, African Body Markings and the Construction of Blackness in Colonial Brazil (18th Century)

Spring 2023

Black Atlantic Speaker Series: Mariana Candido, Emory University, “Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola”

Spring 2022

2020 Black Atlantic History Lecture: Marjoleine Kars, Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Winner of the 2021 Cundill Prize and Co-Winner of the Fredrick Douglass Prize for. Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast.

Fall 2021

Joshua Rothman, Professor and Chair, Department of History University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, “The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America”

Other Black Diasporas Conference:

Jesús Ruiz, Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt, "Ephemeral Dominions: Black Fugitivity in the Caribbean and Hispaniola"           

Miriam Erickson, Academic Support Coordinator, Vanderbilt Writing Center, “African Diaspora in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1791-1818”                     

Justin Parker Jones, Leadership Alliance/ VU-EDGE Program Fellow, University of Pittsburgh, “Mapping the Diaspora of the Black Auxiliary Troops of Carlos IV of Spain”

Caree Banton, Assistant Professor of Afro-Caribbean History & Director of African & African American Studies, University of Arkansas, “’More Auspicious Shores’: Barbadian Post-Emancipation Emigration and Settlement of Crozerville, Liberia"               

Danyelle Valentine, Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies, “A Rhetoric on Emigration: How The Pine and Palm incentivized Black American migration to Trinidad & British Guiana”               

Elvira Aballí Morell, Mellon Graduate Fellow for the Digital Humanities, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, “Anarquistas y Cuatreros: The Deportation of Abakuá Society Members to Fernando Po"        

Selena Sanderfer Doss, Assistant Professor of History & African American Studies, Western Kentucky University, “Black Emigration Movements in the Post-Civil War South”

Spring 2001

Marcy Norton, Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania, “Hunting in Spain and Mexico, 1400-1650: Towards a History of Interspecies Intersubjectivity”

Spring 2020

2020 Black Atlantic History Lecture: Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies and History, and Director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University,  “Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom and the Law in Cuba, Virginia and Louisiana

Fall 2019

John Garrison Marks, Senior Manager, American Association for State and Local History, “Paths to Freedom: Manumission in Cartagena and Charleston”

Julia Gaffield, Assistant Professor of History, Georgia State University, “The Abandoned Faithful: Haiti and the Racialization of International Law”

Charleton Yingling, ‘Assistant Professor of History, University of Louisville, “’Their Siblings of the Soil’: Dominicans and Haiti in the Age of Revolutions”

Spring 2019

2019 Black Atlantic History Lecture: Herman Bennett, Professor of History, City College of New York, “Before the Human: Africans, Sovereigns and Slaves”

Jason Herbert, PhD candidate, Department of History, University of Minnesota, “Written on Rawhide: Seminole Sovereignty in the Atlantic World, 1750-1842

Spring 2018

2018 Black Atlantic History Lecture: Madison Smartt Bell, Professor of English, Goucher College, “White Southern Identity and the Haitian Revolution"

Fall 2017

Marcela Echeverri Muñoz, Associate Professor of History, Yale University, “Slavery in Mainland Spanish America in the Age of Second Slavery”

Ken Kelley, Professor of Anthropology, University of South Carolina, “’Illegal’ Slavery on the Rio Pongo in the 19th Century”

Spring 2017

2017 Black Atlantic History Lecture: John Thornton, Professor of African American Studies and History, Boston University, “Written Documents and Kongo Administration”  and Linda Heywood, Professor of African American Studies and History, Boston University, “The Strategic Diplomacy of Queen Njinga: Written, Spoken, & Performed”

Suzanne Schwarz, Professor of History, University of Worcester, “Adaptation in the Aftermath of Slavery: Women, Trade and Property in Sierra Leone, c. 1790-1812”

Kristen Block, Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, “Contagious Insensibility: The Emotional Terrain of Leprosy, Race, and Enlightened Science in the French Antilles”

Fall 2016

Pablo. F. Gómez, Associate Professor of History and History of Medicine, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic”

David LaFevor, Assistant Professor of History, University of Texas, Arlington, “The Slave Ship Cicerón and the Argűelles Affair: Slavery, Rendition and Emancipation in Spain, the United States and Cuba”

Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Professor, Graduate Department of History, Universidade Federal  Fluminense and National Museum of Anthropology, “Trading Ivory in the Kongo and Loango Kingdoms, from the 15th to the 17th Century”

Joseph C. Miller, T. Cary Johnson, Jr. Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia, “Historicizing Atlantic History”

Spring 2016

2016 Black Atlantic History Lecture:  Emma Christopher, Australian Research Council, presenting her documentary film, They Are We

Jason A. Gillmer, John J. Hemmings Chair in Civil Liberties and Professor of Law, Gonzaga University School of Law, “Lawyers and Slaves on Galveston Island”

Fall 2015

Kristin Mann, Professor of History, Emory University, Biographical Connections linking Benin and Brazil”

Selena Sanderfer: Assistant Professor of History, Western Kentucky University, “Women’s Leadership and the Antebellum Colonization/Emigration Movement”

Spring 2015

2015 Black Atlantic History Lecture:  Randy. J. Sparks, Professor of History, Tulane University, “’Country Marriages’ on the Gold Coast: Trade, Interracial Relationships and he Rise of an Anglo-African Community”

James E. Sanders, Professor of History, Utah State University, “The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America”

Molly Warsh, Assistant Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh, “American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700”

Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Professor of History and Center for African Studies, Universidade Federal Fluminense, “Friendship and Diplomacy between Portugal and Dahomey in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade”

Fall 2014

Philip J. Kaisary, PhD Candidate, University of Warwick, “Hercules, the Hydra and the 1801 Constitution of Toussaint Louverture”

Chuck Orser, Professor of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, “Colonial Conflict and Collapse: Modern-World Archaeology at Small Scale on Providence Island”

David Wheat, Assistant Professor of History, Michigan State University, “The Rivers of Guinea in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean”

Spring 2014

2014 Black Atlantic History Lecture:  Richard Rabinowitz, President, American History Workshop, “Curating the Common Wind: Representing the Revolutionary Rhetoric of the Black Atlantic in a Museum Exhibit”

David Wheat, Assistant Professor of History, Michigan State University, “The Rivers of Guinea in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean”

Sophie White, Assistant Professor of American Studies, University of Notre Dame, “Beyond the Slave Narrative, Within and Beyond the French Atlantic”

Michelle McKinley, Assistant Professor, Oregon School of Law, “Degrees of Freedom: Intimacy, Slavery, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima”

Fall 2013

Melanie Newton, Professor of History, University of Toronto, “No Original Right in the Soil of the Country: Indigeneity and Law in the Early Modern Caribbean”

Lea Geler, Professor of History, University of Buenos Aires, “Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires at the End of the 19th Century: Black Journalism in the White Nation”

Spring 2013

2013 Black Atlantic History Lecture: James H. Sweet, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, “Inconvenient Truths: the Hidden Histories of African Lisbon during the Era of the Slave Trade”

Kathleen Wilson, Professor of History and Cultural Analysis and Theory, State University of New York, Stony Brook, “Performing Sheridan in Jamaica”

James A. Epstein, Distinguished Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “A Conspiracy in the Archive”

Fall 2012

James Walvin, Professor of History, University of York, “The slave ship Zong: Killing Africans and the origins of abolition"   

Celia Cussen, Professor of History, Universidad de Chile, “Writing the Life and Legacy of Fray Martín de Porres, Afroperuvian Saint"

Jennifer Anderson, Assistant Professor of History, Stony Brook University, "From Rainforest to Parlor: The Geopolitics of Mahogany in an Atlantic Context"

Spring 2012

2012 Black Atlantic History Lecture:  María Elisa Velázquez, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), Mexico, “Africans and Afro-Descended Women in Mexico in Colonial Times: Social Relationships and Cultural Production”

Eric Hinderaker, Associate Professor of History, University of Utah, “Boston’s Massacre, Britain’s Empire: Military-civilian Relations in the Early Modern Atlantic World" 

Keila Grinberg, Associate Professor, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, "Soil Free from Slaves: Slave Law in Late 18th Century and Early 19th Century Portugal"

Catherine A. Molineux, Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “The Portuguese Fetish Thief: Power and Politics on the Eighteenth-Century Slave Coast”

Jeremy Popkin, Marsall Hahn, Jr. Professor of History, University of Kentucky, “Stories of Saint-Domingue, Stories of Haiti, Stories of the Modern World”

New Perspectives on Slavery & Abolition in Brazil: A Graduate Student Panel: Francisca Carla S. Ferrer, University of São Paulo, Maria Emília Vasconselos dos Santos, UNICAMP, Luciana Cruz Brito, University of São Paulo, Maíra Chinelatto Alves, University of São Paulo

Fall 2011

Ibrahima Seck, Associate Professor of History, Université Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (UCAD)/ West Africa Research Center, Lunch talk: “Linking Historical Research and Sites of Memory: The Case of Whitney plantation in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana”

Jennifer Greeson, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia, Lunch talk: "The U.S. South and the Atlantic World "Lecture: "The Imperial Roots of Empiricism: Reading Francis Bacon through Thomas Harriot"

Karl Monsma, Professor of History, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Lunch talk: “Recent Trends in Research on Post-abolition Brazil”
Lecture: “Enslaved Cowboys of Southern Brazil: Strategies of Domination and Resistance”

Spring 2011

2011 Black Atlantic History Lecture:  Mamadou Diouf, Professor of History, Columbia University and Toyin Falola Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin; Moses Ochonu, Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, "Historicizing the Black Atlantic, Comparative Colonialism, and Transnational Citizenship” 

Mater of Liberal Arts & Science Workshop: Stephen M. Doster, “The Importation, Adaptation, and Creolization of Slave Leisure Forms in the Americas: 1600 to 1865”; Crickett Harmer, “The Effects of ‘Cloth Politics’ in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Cause, Cash, Commodity and Comfort”; Hunter Moore, “Singing for Strength: Enslaved Africans and Community Building in the Transatlantic Slave Trade”

Africa and the Atlantic World Symposium: Kwasi Konadu, Associate Professor of History, CUNY, “African Diasporic History: The Akan Optic,” and Mariana Candido, Assistant Professor of History, Princeton, “Benguela, an African Slaving Port on the Atlantic World”      

Linford Fischer, Assistant Professor of History, Brown University, Co-Sponsored with the Divinity School, “The Indian Great Awakening? Natives, Religion, and Empire in New England, 1700-1800”

Catherine A. Molineux, Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “The Portuguese Fetish Thief: Power and Politics on the Eighteenth-Century Slave Coast”

Afro-Cuba Symposium: Matt Childs, Associate Professor of History, University of South Carolina, “Gendering the African Diaspora in the Iberian Atlantic: Recreating African Ethnic Identities through Religious Brotherhoods and Cabildos de Nación”; and Oscar Grandío, Adjunct Professor of History, University of North Florida, “Rebuilding a Congo Nation’: West Central Africans in Colonial Cuba”

Luis Nicolau Parés, Professor of Anthropology, Federal University of Bahia, “African Nations and Ethnic Identity in the Mina Coast and in Brazil: an Atlantic Comparative Approach”

Fall, 2010

Laura Stevens, Associate Professor of English, University of Tulsa, Seminar discussion on Transatlantic Scholarship, Publication, and Pedagogy,  “The New Pilgrim’s Progress: Anglican Longings and Eighteenth-Century Missionary Fantasies”

Rafael Marquese, Associate Professor of History, Universidade de São Paulo, “The Proslavery International and the Politics of the Second Slavery”

Peter Hudson, Assistant Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “Germaine, Evangeline, and Other ‘Negro Girls’: Rudy Burckhardt’s Caribbean”

Jill Lane, Associate Professor of Theater, New York University, Seminar discussion on Atlantic World Theater Studies, “Performance, Race and Nation in Cuba”

Greg Childs, Doctoral Student in History, New York University, "The Problem of Conspiracy, “The Challenge of Sedition: Modes of Resistance and the Tailor's Conspiracy' of 1798 in Bahia, Brazil”

Spring 2010

2010 Black Atlantic History Lecture: Sue Peabody, Professor of History, Washington State University, Vancouver, “Justice on the Margins: Popular and Official Claims to Freedom”

Africa and the Atlantic World Program: Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Professor of History, Fluminese Federal University, Rio de Janeiro, “African Barbers and Bleeders in Brazilian Slave Ports: A Case Study from Rio de Janeiro"; Yacine Daddi Addoun, PhD Candidate in History, York University, Toronto, “Securing Paradise: Salvation through Manumission in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Algeria”

Mariza de Carvalho Soares and Yacine Daddi Addoun, “Preservation of African Historical Sources”

Gad Heuman, Professor of History and Centre for Caribbean Studies, Warwick University and Editor, Slavery & Abolition, “Workshop on Publishing on the Atlantic World” and Public Lecture, “Slavery, Apprenticeship and Emancipation in the Caribbean”

Tiffany Patterson, Associate Director, Program in African American and Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University, “Post-occupation Haiti in the Moral Imagination of Zora Neale Hurston”

Lauren Clay, Assistant Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “Justifying the Slave Trade in the Era of Human Rights: M. Chambom’s Le Commerce de l’Amérique par Marseille”

Caitlin Fitz, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Yale University, “Bolivar, U.S.A.: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, 1815-1825”

Brazil, Africa, and the Atlantic World Symposium

Maria Cristina Wissenbach, Professor of History, University of São Paulo, “Atlantic Routes and Travel Reports in the Era of the Illegal Slave Trade: Georg Tams and Ribeiro dos Santos in Western Central Africa”; Respondent: Moses Ochonu, Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

Marina de Mello e Souza, Professor of History, University of São Paulo, “Njinga and the Consolidation of Matamba’s Chieftaincy as a Partner of Portuguese Merchants, 17th century”; Respondent: Jane Landers, Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

John Monteiro, Chair and Professor of Anthropology, Universidade Federal de Campinas, “Colonial Indians: Indigenous Actors in the Making of Portuguese America"; Respondent: Dan Usner, Holland M. McTyeire Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

Maria Helena Machado, Professor of History, University of São Paulo, “Slavery and Social Movements in Nineteenth-Century Brazil:  Slave Strategies and Abolition”; Respondent: Richard Blackett, Andrew Jackson Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

Fall, 2009

Christine Rivas, Visiting Fulbright Scholar, Carleton University, Canada, “Who is White?: Colonial Spanish Dominican History Through the Lens of Whiteness Studies”

Peter C. Mancall, Professor of History and Anthropology, University of Southern California, “Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson--A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic”

Gabriel Cervantes, Assistant Professor of English, Vanderbilt University, "Defoe's Criminal Atlantic"

Spring 2009

2009 Black Atlantic History Lecture: Vincent Brown, Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History, Harvard University, “The Reaper’s Garden: Social Death and Political Life in Slavery”

Vanderbilt Graduate Student Research Seminar: Justin Haynes, Department of English; Derek Spires, Department of English; Selena Sanderfer, Department of History, Pablo Gómez, Department of History, Destiny Birdsong, Department of English   

Christoph Rosenmuller, Associate Professor of History, Middle Tennessee State University, “Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico”

Fall 2008

Laurent Dubois, Professor of French and History, Duke University, “Banjo: A Cultural History”

Jane Landers, Associate Professor of History and Celso Castilho, Research Assistant Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “Antislavery Writings by Atlantic Creoles”

Spring 2008

2008 Black Atlantic History Lecture: David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History, Emory University, “Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade”

David Wheat, PhD Candidate in History, Vanderbilt University, “The Afro-Iberian Roots of the Early Atlantic World”

Derrick Spires, American Studies Fellow, Department of English, “Staging Citizenship in the Black State Conventions of the 1840s”

Christopher Leslie Brown, Professor of History, Columbia University, “Origin Stories: English Evangelicals and the Rise of British Antislavery”

Fall 2007

Rosanne Adderley, Associate Professor, Program in African American and Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University, “Ethnographic Knowledge and Abolitionist Politics: Colonial Office Rethinking of Africans in the Context of Slave Trade Suppression”

Ifeoma Nwankwo, Associate Professor of English, Vanderbilt University, “Economies of Exotic Desire: Reciprocal Representations in U.S. African American and Afro-Caribbean Popular Culture, 1990-2000”

Spring 2007

2007 Inaugurating the Black Atlantic History Lecture: British Slavery & Emancipation: Commemorating the 200th Anniversary of Abolition of Slavery

Philip D. Morgan, Harry Black Professor of History, The Johns Hopkins University, “British Slavery in the Era of Abolition” and Christopher Leslie Brown, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University, “Anniversaries and Teleologies: Slave Trade Abolition 200 Years Later”

Anna Brickhouse, Professor of Literature, University of Virginia, “Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere”

Jane Landers, Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “Maroons and the Landscape of Colonial Cartagena”

David Wheat, Graduate Student, Department of History, Vanderbilt University, "Matrilineage and Social Mobility: West Central Africans in Late 16th Century Havana"

Caribbean Poetry Panel: A conversation with Kwame Dawes, Lorna Goodison, and J. Edward Chamberlin, moderated by Sean Goudie;  Readings by Lorna Goodison and Kwame Dawes; reception and book signing

Prose Writers Panel: Cuba, Guatemala, and the U.S. – A conversation with Teresa de la Caridad Doval and Francisco Goldman, moderated by William Luis; Readings by Francisco Goldman and Teresa de la Caridad Doval; reception and book signing  

Fall 2006

Roderick McDonald, Professor of History, Rider University, “The Ethnography and Pornography of Slavery: Dr. Jonathan Troup's Journal of Dominica, 1789-1791”

Catherine A. Molineux, Assistant Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “Pleasures of the Smoke: ‘Black Virginians’ in Georgian London’s Tobacco Shops”

Spring 2006

Kris Lane, Associate Professor of History, College of William and Mary, "Romancing the Stone: Atlantic Emerald Markets and the Mines of Colonial Muzo, Colombia"

Sean Goudie, Assistant Professor of English, Vanderbilt University, “Advertising the United Fruit Company”

Black Atlantic History Seminar 2006

Anastasia Curwood, African American Studies Program, “African American Marriages in the Era of New Negroes and New Women”;

Moses Ochonu, History, “Imperial and Post-imperial Britain in the Northern Nigerian Muslim Imagination”

Jane Landers, History, “Juan Bautista Witten, Formerly Known as Big Prince: A Study in African Identities in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions”

Tracey Sharpley-Whiting, African American Studies, Moderator

Dan Usner, History, Comments       

Fall 2005

Julius S. Scott, III, Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan, “The Haitian Revolution at Sea”

Dan Usner, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “Seminar on Hurricane Katrina”

Nels Pearson, Assistant Professor of Literature, Tennessee State University, “Transnationalism in Irish Women’s Fiction”

Kristen Silva Gruesz, Associate Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, “Ambassadors of Culture: the Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing”

James Walvin, Professor of History, Provost of the University of York, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, “What was the Importance of Abolishing the Slave Trade?”

Spring 2005

Nancy Ruttenberg, Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University

Natalie Zacek, Lecturer in History, University of Manchester, “Cultivating Virtue: The Discourse of Planter Benevolence in the Eighteenth-Century English West Indies"

Fall 2004

Jane Landers, Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “Slave Conspirators in the Contested Landscape of  17th century Cartagena, Colombia”

Robin Blackburn, Essex University, “Haiti’s Contribution to the Age of Revolution”

Black Atlantic History Seminar 2004

Richard Blackett, History, “A Different Underground Railroad: Resistance to Slavery in Nashville, TN”;Mariza Carvalho de Soares, Visiting Scholar, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio, “Gender Politics in an 18th Century Black Brotherhood in Rio de Janeiro”;Jane Landers, History, “Black Abolitionists in 19th Century Cuba”; Shawn Salvant, English, “Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood: Out of Obscurity” Judith Williams, Visiting Ford Fellow, U of Kansas, “Playing Indian: Racial Masking in “New Orleans, Louisiana and São Luis de Maranhão, Brazil ;

Lucius Outlaw, Jr., African American Studies Program, Moderator

Fall 2003

Laurent Dubois, Assistant Professor of History, Western Michigan University, “Fire in the Cane: the Slave Revolt of Saint Domingue”

Rhonda Collier, Assistant Professor of English, Lipscomb University, "Mothering Cuba: the Poetics of Afro-Cuban Women"

Ron Messier and Rebecca Conard, Professors of History, Middle Tennessee State University, "A Field School in Public History at St. Pierre, Martinique" 

Spring 2003

Jane Merritt, Assistant Professor of History, Old Dominion University, “Tea Traders and the Ambivalent American Moral Economy”

Teresa Goddu, Assistant Professor of English and & Mark Schoenfield, Associate Professor of English, Vanderbilt University, “Analyzing the Account of Mary Prince”

William Luis, Professor of Spanish, Vanderbilt University, “Cuban Music through the Ages”

Black Atlantic History Seminar 2003

Dennis Dickerson, History, “Protestant Preachers in the Public Square: the Careys of Chicago”; Dan Usner, History, “From Hunting Camps to Camp Meetings: Indian-Black Relations in Frontier Mississippi”;

Jane Landers, History, “Juan Bautista Witten, Formerly Known as Big “Prince”; Richard King, Visiting Scholar, Notingham University, “Black Atlantics”; Devin Fergus, History, Integrating Black Power: Notes on the Black Panther Party in America in the 1970s”; Lucius Outlaw, Jr., African American Studies Program, Moderator                   

Fall 2002

Sean Goudie, Assistant Professor of English, Vanderbilt University, “Paracolonialism: Reading Early U.S. American Literature and Culture Postcolonially”

Richard King, Professor of History, Nottingham University, England, “From Roots to Routes: the Odyssey of C.L.R. James”

James Epstein, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “The Strange Case of Louisa Calderon and the Politics of Colonial Sensation”