Chair – Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Affiliated Faculty: Women’s and Gender Studies; Africana Studies

Education

Ph.D., University of North Carolina

Fields and specialties

Cuba, slavery and African Diaspora, colonial Latin America

Teaching areas

Latin American and Caribbean history and culture, slavery and African Diaspora, gender

Research interests

Cuba, slavery, cultural practices (scroll down for details)

Selected publications and presentations

Shade Grown Slavery: Slaves and Coffee Plantations in Western Cuba. Vanderbilt University Press, 2013. http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/index.php/books/540/shade-grown-slavery

“The Process of Cultural Change Among Cuban Bozales During the Nineteenth Century.” The Americas, vol. 62 no. 2

“Adaptive Tactics: Cross-cultural Strategies in Cuban Slave Rebellions” for the American Historical Association annual meeting, New Orleans, 2013

“Cafecitos para todos: Cuba and Coffee as Cultural Performance, 1830-1870,” presented at the XXX Latin American Studies Association International Congress, San Francisco, 2012..

“Conceptualizing Disease: How African Understandings Shaped Responses to Sickness in the Cuban Slave Population” invited seminar talk for Dept. of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

Current research projects
Food as a cultural bridge in 19^th Century Cuba; emancipation in the coffee district of western Cuba; warfare and rebellion as a form of negotiation; the relationship between the Latin American left and the Anarchist movement in Spain in the early 20^th century.