Alejandro de la Fuente
Professor of African and African American Studies and of History, Harvard University
A historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations, Professor de la Fuente joined Harvard University after holding faculty appointments at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of South Florida in Tampa, and the University of Havana. His works on race, slavery, and Atlantic history have been published in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, German, and French. He is also the curator of two art exhibits dealing with issues of race: Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art(Havana-Pittsburgh-New York City-Cambridge, Ma, 2010-12) and Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba (Santiago de Cuba-Havana, 2013, ongoing). Between 2007 and 2012 de la Fuente served as a Senior Co-Editor of Hispanic American Historical Review.
Professor de la Fuente is the author of Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century(University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), published in Spanish as Una nación para todos: raza, desigualdad y política en Cuba, 1900-2000 (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2001), winner of the Southern Historical Association’s 2003 prize for “best book in Latin American history.” He is the editor of two bilingual (English-Spanish) volumes, Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba (Pittsburgh, 2013) and Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh, 2011) and of a special issue of the journal Debate y Perspectivas titled “Su único derecho: los esclavos y la ley” [“Their Only Right: Slaves and the Law”] (Madrid, 2004). In 2004, Law and History Review published a “forum” on de la Fuente’s article “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited.” This article was also debated in the Workshop “Comparative Slavery in the Atlantic World: The Tannenbaum Thesis Revisited” of the Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard.
Professor de la Fuente is the founding Director of the Institute of Afro-Latin American Studies at Harvard and the faculty Co-Chair, along with Professor Jorge Domínguez, of the Cuban Studies Program. He is the Senior Editor of the journal Cuban Studies.
Jane Landers
Professor of History, Vanderbilt University
Jane Landers is an historian of Colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World specializing in the history of Africans and their descendants in those worlds. She is the author of Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass., 2010) which wasawarded the Rembert Patrick Book Award and honorary mention for the Conference on Latin American History’s 2011 Bolton Johnson Prize. Her first monograph Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005) was awarded the Frances B. Simkins Prize for Distinguished First Book in Southern History and was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Landers co-authored the college textbook, The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (Harlan Davidson, 2007) and edited Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic World: New Sources and New Findings (Oxfordshire, England, 2017), Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida (Gainesville, 2000, 2001) and Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas (London, 1996). She also co-edited Slaves, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, 2006), and The African American Heritage of Florida (Gainesville, 1995) which won the Rembert Patrick Book Award and a commendation from the American Society for State and Local History. She has published essays in The American Historical Review, Slavery and Abolition, The New West Indian Guide, The Americas, Colonial Latin American Historical Review, The Journal of African American History and a variety of anthologies and edited volumes.
Her research has been supported by grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Conference on Latin American History, Vanderbilt University, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Historic St. Augustine Research Institute, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities.
Landers has been a member of UNESCO’s International Scientific Committee Save Route Project since 2015. She is past-president of the Conference on Latin American History, the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, and the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association. She is Associate of the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University and serves on the editorial boards for several historical journals, including Slavery & Abolition, Colonial Latin American Historical Review and Oxford Bibliography On-line: Atlantic World. She has also consulted on a variety of archaeological projects, documentary films, web sites, and museum exhibits related to the African Diaspora including Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first free black town in what is today the United States.
Landers directs the Slave Societies Digital Archive hosted by the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt which is preserving endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to slavery in the Atlantic World. https://www.slavesocieties.org. With grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, the British Library Endangered Archives Programme, the Historic St. Augustine Research Institute and the Diocese of St. Augustine, and with the help of her graduate students, Landers and her international teams have preserved records in Cuba, Brazil, Colombia, Spanish Florida, and Cape Verde, the oldest dating from the 16th century.