The Ph.D. Program in History

at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

History Program Events

November 2 – Marisa Fuentes on “Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: African Captives and the Deathly Production of the Transatlantic Slave Trade”

Marisa J. Fuentes’s scholarship brings together critical historiography, historical geography, and black feminist theory to examine gender, sexuality, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic World. She is the author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) which won both the Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize and the Berkshires Conference of Women’s Historians First Book Prize. Dispossessed Lives illuminates the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth century Bridgetown, Barbados by reading fragments of traditional archival materials “against the bias grain.” The book interrogates the archive and its historical production to challenge the methods and categories by which historians have analyzed slavery in the Atlantic World, in addition to engaging with larger questions of violence, agency, and gender. She has written a number of articles, book chapters, and book reviews, including “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachel Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive,” which won the Andres Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize. She is also the co-editor of Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, Volume I (Rutgers University Press, 2016), and the ‘Slavery and the Archive’ special issue in History of the Present (November 2016). Her next project will explore the connections between capitalism, the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the disposability of black lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

November 2nd from 5 – 7 pm

PhD Program in History lounge, room 5114

 

 

 

Marisa Fuentes, Associate Professor Women’s & Gender Studies and History

 

Part of the New World Migrations lecture series

Co sponsored by

The PhD Program in History

The PhD Program in Anthropology

The PhD Program in Economics

Women’s and Gender Studies

Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas & the Caribbean

Center for Latin American Caribbean & Latino Studies