Social Sciences Research Seminar

Social Sciences Research Seminars

Time: 12:15 – 1:30 PM
Location: Powdermaker Hall, Room 333
The traditional pizza from the one and only Gino’s of Kissena will be served
🔍 Upcoming Schedule:

Wednesday, February 7^th

Speaker: Dr. Fidel Tavárez (Department of History)

Topic: “Plantation Dreams in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean.”

In the eighteenth century, local elites from the Spanish Caribbean began to request manifold concessions from the crown to create slave societies centered on producing tropical commodities. While historians have long recognized the second half of the eighteenth century as a pivotal transition period in the emergence of slavocracies in the Spanish Caribbean, especially in Cuba, few have pointed out the often-explicit impediments the Council of the Indies and the crown placed before the colonial elite’s plantation dreams. The crown, to be sure, was not opposed to slavery per se, but the king and his ministers preferred to employ enslaved Africans as subjects in the making who would eventually become settlers in underpopulated areas of the empire. The creole elite, in turn, endeavored to employ enslaved Africans as disposable labor to produce cheap commodities for global markets. While the creole elite eventually succeeded, it was only after the crown succumbed in the face of an unprecedented imperial crisis beginning in the 1790s, which demonstrates that the rise of slave societies in the Spanish Caribbean was an act of imperial defiance, not the result of collaboration between elites and the crown.

Wednesday (academic Monday), February 28^th

Speaker: Dr. Megan Victor (Department of Anthropology)

Topic: ” Title: “A Notorious Gang”: An Examination of Molly Houses in the 18th Century Documentary Record and a Search for the LGBTQ+ Community in the Archaeological Record.”