Added on 12/16/2013, link to event news announcement: http://cms.uflib.ufl.edu/News/index#20131212b. Original posting below is unchanged, aside from this note and the horizontal line added.
It’s feels almost silly to blog about this event so far in advance of the event, but it’s certain to be a fabulous event. I’m already chatting with lots of folks about it, and they all need to get it on their calendars now to reserve time with scheduling classes and meetings and such, so it’s best for me to have ready access to the full information. Because it’s so far in advance, this is early draft announcement text, and I apologize and take full responsibility for any errors. Even though early for many, it’s very timely for others, so I hope this might be helpful for others for scheduling.
“Recovering Afro-Hispanic Lives from Spanish Colonial Records….and Making Them Available Digitally”
2:30 pm Wednesday, 22 January 2014, Smathers Library Room 1A
Jane Landers, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, Vanderbilt University will present from her current project, a biography of Francisco Menendez and on the digital humanities project she directs, “Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies” (ESSSS), http://www.vanderbilt.edu/esss. Professor Landers will address the rich documentary records available for persons of African descent in Spanish colonial archives, including those in Florida, and describes how unearthing one African man’s fascinating life led to archaeological projects, publications, museum exhibits and, finally, a digital archive of similar records collected in Florida, Cuba, Brazil and Colombia.
This event is sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, the African-American Studies Program, the History Department, the George A. Smathers Libraries, and the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.
Speaker Bio for Jane Landers
The recipient of many prestigious grants including a Guggenheim and an ACLS, Jane Landers is an historian of Colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World specializing in the history of Africans and their descendants in those worlds. She is the author of Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass., 2010) which was awarded the Rembert Patrick Book Award and honorary mention for the Conference on Latin American History’s 2011 Bolton Johnson Prize for the best English-language book on any aspect of Latin American History. Her first monograph Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005) was awarded the Frances B. Simkins Prize for Distinguished First Book in Southern History and was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Landers co-authored the college textbook, The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (Harlan Davidson, 2007) and edited Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida (Gainesville, 2000, 2001) and Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas (London, 1996). She also co-edited Slaves, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, 2006), and The African American Heritage of Florida (Gainesville, 1995) which won the Rembert Patrick Book Award and a commendation from the American Society for State and Local History. Most recently she was interviewed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for a segment of his PBS documentary series The African Americans, Many Rivers to Cross (Oct. 22- Nov. 26, 2013).