Information about Participants

Anyaa Anim-Addo completed her doctoral studies in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is currently a Caird research fellow at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

Matthew R. Bahar is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Oklahoma. He is currently completing a dissertation that explores the relationship of the Wabanaki Indians of the American northeast to the early modern Atlantic world.

Marina Bilbija is a joint PhD candidate in English Literature and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are black utopian thought and the literatures and print-journalism of the Black Atlantic. Her dissertation, entitled “Worlds of Color: Black Utopias and Anti-Colonial Internationalisms 1888-1919,” examines new forums of international inter-racial alliance that emerged at the height of the so-called “age of Empire,” including the Pan African Conference of 1900, the Universal Races Congress of 1911 and the print-communities that coalesced around the publication of African-American and British-based Afro-diasporic journals such as Fraternity, The Colored American Magazine, The Voice of the Negro, The Crisis, and The African Times and The Orient Review.

Kristen Block is an assistant professor in the History Department at Florida Atlantic University, where she teaches courses on the Atlantic World and colonial Americas. Her first book, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, will be released this June as part of the Early American Places series, published by University of Georgia Press.

Vincent Brown is Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008). This year he is a fellow at the National Humanities Center.

Matthew Casey received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in the Spring of 2012. He will begin a job at the University of Southern Mississippi in the fall. This year he was co-winner of the Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Award, given by the Association of Caribbean Historians for the best article in Caribbean history.

Kahlil Chaar-Pérez holds a PhD from the Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures Department at New York University. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Caribbean literatures and cultures, intellectual history, aesthetics, and political philosophy. He is currently working on a book project centering on Cuban and Puerto Rican anticolonial aesthetics and politics, from the Spanish Constitution of 1837 to the US takeover of the Spanish colonies in 1898.

Roberto Chauca is a PhD candidate from the Department of History at the University of Florida. He is interested in the history of cartography, ethnography, Jesuits and Franciscans, and processes of nation making in Amazonia. He has been recently awarded a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from The Wenner-Gren Foundation and a Beca de Apoyo a la Investigacion from the Instituto Frances de Estudios Andinos to conduct dissertation research during the next academic year in Peru and Ecuador.

Raphael Dalleo is Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. His most recent book is Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial (University of Virginia Press, 2011), which gives a comparative literary history of the region. He is also coauthor of The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), a study of the relationship of politics and the market to contemporary literature from the Hispanic Caribbean diaspora. His articles have appeared in journals such asInterventions, Postcolonial Text, Research in African Literatures, and Small Axe.

John Dixon is a PhD student in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. In his dissertation, he uses logbooks to map ships at sea in the late eighteenth century, 1775-1800. His other academic interests include early American history, the history of technology and science, and material culture. He holds an AM degree in History from Harvard and undergraduate degrees in History and Ceramic and Materials Engineering from Clemson University.

John Funchion’s work on early and nineteenth-century American literature has appeared or is forthcoming in Early American Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, and Modernist Cultures. He’s currently completing work on a book entitled States of Nostalgia: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth-Century America. 

Jenna M. Gibbs is an assistant professor of history at Florida International University, where she teaches American and Atlantic history. She is in the final stages of revising for publication her first book, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater and Popular Culture in the British Atlantic (1800s to 1850s), which examines the crucial role of transatlantic performative culture—theater, broadsides, ballads, cartoons and related media—in shaping Anglo-American debates about slavery. Gibbs has also given numerous conference presentations and published articles and essays on the transatlantic performance of race, slavery, and rights. 

Miles Grier received his PhD in American Studies from New York University and is completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University. His current book project uses the circum-Atlantic transformations of Othello to investigate the ways in which the black and white palette of print culture and of stage cosmetics contributed to the development of a system for visualizing and interpreting the capacities of strangers in a vast Atlantic commercial economy. He will be Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, in 2012-13.

Tracy Devine Guzmán is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies, Portuguese, and Spanish at the University of Miami. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of intellectual and cultural history, politics, social theory, philosophy, and cultural production in the Americas with a focus on Brazil and the Andes. She is author of Native and National: Representing Indigeneity in Post-Independence Brazil, forthcoming with the University of North Carolina Press through the Mellon-funded First Peoples Initiative.

Lillian Manzor is Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. She is the author of Borges/Escher, Cobra/CoBrA: un encuentro posmoderno (Pliegos 1996), of the digital humanities publication the Cuban Theater Digital Archive, co-author of Cuban Theater in Miami: 1960-1980 , and co-editor of Latinas on Stage (Third Woman Press 2000), Teatro cubano actual: dramaturgia escrita en los Estados Unidos (Editorial Alarcos 2005), and Teatro venezolano contemporáneo (Editorial Alarcos 2007). She is currently finishing a book manuscript on Cuban theater in the US, Marginality Beyond Return: US-Cuban Performances and Politics.

Yuko Miki is assistant professor of Latin American History at Washington University in St. Louis and secretary of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). She is the author of “Fleeing into Slavery: The Insurgent Geographies of Brazilian Quilombolas (Maroons), 1880-1881” in The Americas 68:4 (2012) and “Diasporic Africans and Postcolonial Brazil: Notes on the Intersection of Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Nation” in Revista Unisinos (2011). She is currently completing a book manuscript on postcolonial territorial conquest and the intersection of black and indigenous history in nineteenth-century Brazil.

Aaron Alejandro Olivas is a doctoral candidate from the UCLA Department of History specializing in Spanish imperial history. His current dissertation project, entitled “Loyalty and Disloyalty to the Bourbon Dynasty in Spanish America and the Philippines during the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-1715),” deals with forms of both resistance and collaboration between Spanish colonial elites and the Bourbon governments of Spain and France at the turn of the eighteenth century. He is also a member of the Centro de Estudios Coloniales Iberoamericanos de UCLA (CECI).

Pablo Palomino, PhD Candidate in History at UC Berkeley and Licenciadoin History from the University of Buenos Aires, is writing his dissertation on transnational musical networks, originated in a broader interest on Latin American history from a transnational and global perspective. He has taught undergraduate courses at both institutions as instructor for several years, and was a 2010-11 CLIR-Mellon and SSRC fellow.

Lara Stein Pardo is an artist and PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is currently a fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Kunal Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami School of Law. He works in the areas of American legal and intellectual history, the history of American citizenship and immigration law, and colonial Indian history.

Jason Pearl is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University. He specializes in British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century and has written articles on travel writing, natural history, and the eighteenth-century novel. He is currently finishing a book project entitled Utopias of the Early English Novel.

Bianca Premo is Associate Professor of Latin American History at Florida International University. She is the author of Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (UNC, 2005), and the co-editor ofRaising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America. Her research interests include law, gender, childhood and slavery in colonial Lima and the Spanish Atlantic more broadly, and she is currently at work on a book about civil litigation and the Enlightenment in the Spanish empire.

Kate Ramsey teaches in the History Department at the University of Miami and is the author of The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago, 2011). Her research and teaching interests include the politics of law, religion, and performance in the Caribbean; "magic" and modernity; Caribbean intellectual histories and social movements; and the relationship between anthropology and history.

Jane I. Seiter received her PhD from the University of Bristol, England, in July 2011. Her dissertation, "The Archaeology of Resistance: The Brigands' War in St. Lucia, 1794-1800," looks at the impact of warfare and development on the landscapes of the Caribbean. She is currently a partner in the Oxford Tree-Ring Laboratory, where she specializes in the archaeology of historic buildings.

Noel E. Smyth is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests include Native American, Early American, French Colonial, and Atlantic World history. He is currently conducting research for his dissertation on the history of the Natchez. His dissertation follows this Native American diaspora that spans the length of the U.S. South and the French Atlantic.

Tim Watson is director of the American Studies program and Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami. He is the author of Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780-1870 (Cambridge UP, 2008), editor of a special issue of the journal Clio on “Atlantic Narratives” (2010), and coeditor with Candace Ward of a new edition of Cynric Williams’s 1827 novel Hamel, the Obeah Man(Broadview Press, 2010).

Ashli White specializes in revolutionary and early republican U.S. history, with particular attention to connections between the new nation and the Atlantic world. She is the author of Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), which examines the far-reaching impact of the Haitian Revolution on the early United States. Her current project, provisionally titled, Object Lessons of the Revolutionary Atlantic, considers artifacts associated with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions that circulated throughout the North Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century.

Laurie Wood is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, Îles de France: Law and Empire in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, 1680-1780, analyzes the first French empire as a global network, anchored by local jurisdictions known as conseils supérieurs. Her interests include the history of France and its overseas colonies, with particular emphasis on legal culture, social networks, and the early modern era.