Gabriel Rocha

Assistant Professor of History, Drexel University

Gabriel Rocha’s research examines the environmental and social history of the Atlantic world beginning in the fifteenth century. He focuses on the human and non-human spectrum of interactions, from violence to alliance, that brought into contact the diverse societies and ecosystems of Atlantic Africa, Iberia and the Greater Caribbean. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled Empire from the Commons: Political Ecologies of Colonialism and Slavery in the Early Atlantic World, which examines how popular struggles over shared property and collective resources contributed to the formation of the Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic empires over the long sixteenth century.

Jane Landers

Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

Jane Landers is a 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 was awarded the Rembert Patrick Book Award and honorary mention for the Conference on Latin American History’s 2011 Bolton Johnson Prize. 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.

Alejandro de la Fuente

Professor of Latin American History and Economics, Harvard University
Professor of African and African American Studies and of History, Harvard University
Director, Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University

Alejandro de la Fuente is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations. He 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.

Ximena Gómez 

PhD Candidate in History, University of Michigan

Ximena Gómez specializes in the visual culture of the early modern transatlantic world, under the co-direction of Megan Holmes (Michigan) and Stella Nair (UCLA). She is the 2017-2019 Chester Dale Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, where she is currently completing her dissertation, “Nuestra Señora: Confraternal Art and Identity in Early Colonial Lima.” Her research focuses on the roles black and indigenous people played in artistic and religious expression in colonial Peru, and contends with their purposeful erasure by using extensive archival evidence, which allows for the recovery of the long-lost visual culture with which subalterns engaged, including textiles, processional standards, silver work, and ephemeral monuments. Employing a decolonial approach, she considers the art, architecture, and ritual traditions of the Andes and West Africa in her analysis of the European Catholic paintings and sculptures imported to Latin America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Bethan Fisk

Teaching Fellow in Caribbean History, University of Leeds (UK)

Bethan Fisk is a historian of the Caribbean, colonial Latin America, and the Atlantic world and a Teaching Fellow in Caribbean History. She specializes in the history of Afro-Latin America and the African diaspora, with a focus on race, gender, and religion. Fisk is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, Of Waters and Forests: Black Religions in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada, the first full length study on African-descended religion in eighteenth-century Colombia. Using trial testimonies, governmental correspondence, and ecclesiastical records from fourteen archival and printed book collections in Colombia, Spain, and the United States, the book rewrites the history of early modern New Granada as transculturally diasporic, spanning the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific worlds.

David Sartorius

Associate Professor of History, University of Maryland

David Sartorius is a historian of Latin America focusing on race, empire, and mobility in the Caribbean. His book, Ever Faithful:  Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empre in Spanish Cuba, was published by Duke University Press in 2013, and examines the racial politics of colonial rule, including the support of Cubans of African descent, slave and free, for the Spanish government. He has co-edited two special issues of journals dedicated to transnational history: “Dislocations across the Americas” (Social Text, 2010) and “Revolutions and Heterotopias” (Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012). He is also the author of essays about free-colored militias, race and historical memory, slave provision grounds, the 1812 Spanish Constitution, and the place of Darwinism and anthropology in nineteenth-century Cuba. His current research considers the use of passports to and from Cuba during the nineteenth century as a window into questions of mobility, materiality, and classification.

Angélica Sánchez Barona