News and EventsClick here to view Volume One, Issue One, of The History Department Newsletter.
Click here to view the latest issue of The History Department Newsletter (September 2008).
Click here for the fall schedule for the Cold War Seminar.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The NYU Atlantic History Workshop meets most Tuesday's from 12:30 to 2 PM. Click here for a full schedule of sessions.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
AFRICA~DIASPORA FORUM • SPEAKER SERIES
"Africans in the Americas: Got Skills (as well as Labor)?"
For 2008-2009, the African Diaspora Program of the Department of History at NYU has invited scholars to address the question of technological contributions made by Africans in the Americas.
Forum participants are encouraged to review the article by David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” American Historical Review 112 (Dec 2007): 1329-1358.
Wednesday, September 17 - 12:30pm to 2:00pm
LOCATION: History Department, Room 607
SPEAKER: Judith Carney, Professor - UCLA, Department of Geography
TALK TITLE: Rice and the African Diaspora in the Atlantic World
The talk examines the cultural antecedents of rice cultivation in the Americas, arguing that the cereal’s establishment represents the transfer of an indigenous African knowledge system across the Atlantic via slavery. Slaves from West Africa's rice region provided the critical knowledge that transformed lowland environments for the cereal's cultivation in South Carolina at the end of the eighteenth century and more than a century earlier, in Brazil. The ecological, ethnic, and gendered basis of this knowledge system are examined historically in West Africa's rice region, where a separate species of rice was domesticated more than three thousand years ago. A cross- cultural analysis of land use, methods of cultivation, processing and cooking traditions reveals the African lineaments of rice culture in the Black Atlantic.
Judith Carney is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2001), Seeds of Memory: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press, forthcoming), and more than 60 research articles. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller and Wenner-Gren Foundations. Her work includes publications on gender, development, and environmental issues in West Africa and Latin America, food security issues in West Africa, and research on the historical botany of the Black Atlantic.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Please click here for more information on the American History Workshop, taking place on Friday September 19th from 10:00am-12:00pm, with lunch to follow.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
François Delaporte will be speaking at the Institute of French Studies on October 7, 2008:
François Delaporte (Univ. de Picardie-Jules Verne): "La fabrique du nez"
Institute of French Studies, Luncheon Seminar, Oct.7 at 12:30.
François Delaporte is a philosopher of science and historian of medicine who teaches at the University of Picardie-Jules Verne in Amiens, France. He is the author of, most recently, Anatomy of the Passions (Stanford 2008), as well as, Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, 1832 (MIT 1986); Nature's Second Kingdom: Explorations of Vegetality in the Eighteenth Century (MIT, 1982); The History of Yellow Fever: An Essay on the Birth of Tropical Medicine (MIT, 1991); La maladie de Chagas (Payot, 1999); and, with Patrice Pinel, of Histoire des myopathies (Payot, 1998). He is also the co-editor of A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings of Georges Canguilhem (Zone, 1994).
The talk is part of Professor Delaporte's ongoing study of the history of skin grafting, up to and including the first face transplant that took place in Amiens in 2005; it addresses Gaspare Tagliacozzi's seventeenth-century technique of nasal and facial auto-grafting.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
AFRICA~DIASPORA FORUM • SPEAKER SERIES
"Africans in the Americas: Got Skills (as well as Labor)?"
For 2008-2009, the African Diaspora Program of the Department of History at NYU has invited scholars to address the question of technological contributions made by Africans in the Americas.
Forum participants are encouraged to review the article by David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” American Historical Review 112 (Dec 2007): 1329-1358.
Wednesday, October 22 - 4pm to 5:30pm
LOCATION: Remarque Institute, KJCC Room 324
SPEAKER: Msomi Santiago Moor, Ph.D.
Researcher, Joseph E. Harris Center for Research in the Global African Diaspora Howard University
TALK TITLE: Nyansapo: African Expertise and the Development of Colonial American Economies
Why has the technological contribution of Africans to the creation of the Americas been downplayed since western hemisphere history has been written? Is there no evidence that supports a recognized African technological component in the formation of the colonial American economies? This essay will shed light on a gravely underrepresented area of western hemisphere history; the impact of applied African technological expertise in the formation of national economies. In doing so, it will make mention of three distinct locales where applied African technology was carried out during the Africans’ period of bondage specifically from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century: they are the rice fields of South Carolina and Georgia in the Southeastern United States; the alluvial gold mines of Minas Gerais province of Southeastern Brazil; and lastly, the fluvial placers of western and southwestern New Granada (principally Colombia). In its essence then, this talk engages the broader context of planter preference for Africans specifically skilled in tasks that will maximize plantation and mine profits. It lends its focus more towards the quality rather than the quantity argument as to why Africans were brought to the Americas, and sees them as protagonists in their own history while viewing them through the lens of their historic Diaspora.
Msomi Santiago Moor, Ph.D. (J. Santiago Mauer, Ph.D.) completed his master’s and doctoral work at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
His research encompasses African ethnology and expertise during the slavery era of western hemisphere societies. He is a developer of African Diaspora curricula at the university level and specializes in South American HBCU incubation. His doctoral dissertation titled:
"When the Ancestors Speak: Captive African Ethnicity and Labor in Colonial Colombia, 1525-1852" is currently in manuscript form and will be published in both English and Spanish. He is an advocate for both the human and civil rights of African descendants throughout the hemisphere and has helped forge public policies for several communities of African descent most recently in southwestern Colombia. Since 1998 he has worked at the congressional level with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to help put pressure on western hemisphere governments to implement more inclusive policies which have helped to significantly advance African descended communities mired in abject poverty. Currently he is teaching Black Diaspora History courses in the Department of History at Howard University and is a researcher at the Joseph E. Harris Center for Research in the Global African Diaspora.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Federic Ewan Academic Freedom Center is holding an event, Academic Freedom and the Law, on November 13, 2008. Please click here for more information.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
AFRICA~DIASPORA FORUM • SPEAKER SERIES
"Africans in the Americas: Got Skills (as well as Labor)?"
For 2008-2009, the African Diaspora Program of the Department of History at NYU has invited scholars to address the question of technological contributions made by Africans in the Americas.
Forum participants are encouraged to review the article by David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” American Historical Review 112 (Dec 2007): 1329-1358.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19 - 4pm to 5:30pm
LOCATION: Remarque Institute, KJCC Room 324
SPEAKER: Frederick Knight, Assistant Professor, Department of History Colorado State University
TALK TITLE: Working the Diaspora: African Labor and Plantation Development in the Anglo-American Colonies
The African Diaspora in colonial America centered on forced cash crop production. This research speaks to this process by arguing that people in Africa grappled daily with rural life and acquired specific agricultural skills, which captives of the slave trade drew upon to shape plantations in the British American colonies. Evidence from both sides of the Atlantic indicates that African men and women deployed their previous agricultural experience to foster Anglo- American indigo, cotton, tobacco, and staple food production.
Archival and archaeological records also identify African artisans in the Americas, whose labor supported agricultural production. In short, this research enters the debate on African contributions to American agricultural development by arguing for a more expansive and flexible view of African material production and by revisiting the role of African slaves, as workers, in the Americas.
Frederick Knight is an assistant professor in the History Department at Colorado State University. He has held post-doctoral fellowships at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia and the History Department at the University of California, Riverside, where he completed his doctorate. His book manuscript Working the
Diaspora: African Labor and Plantation Development in the Anglo- American Colonies and Early United States will be published by New York University Press. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
The American Historical Association Annual meeting will take place in New York, at the Hilton, from January 2nd-5th, 2009.
| 
