Eventos
In Conversation: Ada Ferrer and Jennifer L. Morgan
In Conversation with Ada Ferrer, author of Cuba: An American History, and Jennifer L. Morgan, author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Moderated by Ana Dopico.
We invite you to join us for a conversation between two eminent historians as they discuss their new books, their reflections on the making of the Americas, their groundbreaking scholarship on race and hemispheric history, and their reflections on storytelling, friendship and legacy.
Spanning more than five centuries, Ferrer’s Cuba: An American History is an ambitious and moving chronicle of the country's history and its relationship with the United States. Drawing on more than thirty years of research—as well as her own extensive travel to the island over the same period—she examines and reveals the evolution of modern Cuba, documenting not only the influence of the United States on the island but also the many ways Cuba has been a recurring presence in US affairs. Filled with rousing stories and characters, this is a book that will give American readers unexpected insights into the history of their own country and, in so doing, offer a way to imagine a ne w relationship with Cuba.
In Reckoning with Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic. From capture to transport to sale to childbirth, these women were demographically counted as commodities during the Middle Passage, vulnerable to rape, separated from their kin at slave markets, and subject to laws that enslaved their children upon birth. In this way, they were central to the binding of reproductive labor with kinship, racial hierarchy, and the economics of slavery.
Bios
Ada Ferrer
Ada Ferrer is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has taught since 1995. She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, winner of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, she has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.
Jennifer L. Morgan
Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University where she also serves as Chair. She is the author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021), Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), and the co-editor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in the Black Atlantic.
Her recent journal articles include "Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery," in Small Axe; "Accounting for 'The Most Excruciating Torment': Trans-Atlantic Passages" in History of the Present, and "Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism" in Social Text. In addition to her archival work as an historian, Morgan has published a range of essays on race, gender, and the process of "doing history," most notably "Experiencing Black Feminism" in Deborah Gray White's edited volume Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2007).
Morgan serves as the Council Chair for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture. She is the past-Vice President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and is a lifetime member of the Association of Black Women Historians.