ACH 2024 Conference Program
Migration and Space in Caribbean History:
55th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH)
Santa Marta, Colombia, May 26-30, 2024
Universidad del Magdalena
Sunday, May 26
3:00-5:00pm Registration
5:00-6:30pm Panel 1 (Local Organizing Committee Panel): Mixed race, migrations, knowledge and education in Colombia
Chair: TBD
Caridad Brito Ballesteros (University of Magdalena): “Mixed race in the Colombian Caribbean in the 18th century”
Adriano Guerra (University of Magdalena): “Migrations and race policies in the Columbian Caribbean in the first half of the 20th century”
Edwin Corena Puentes (University of Magdalena): “Agricultural expansionism: circulation of actors and knowledge in Colombia (1960-1970)”
Elmis Ruíz Ospino: “Addressing racial discrimination in education : challenges and opportunities in the 21st century ”
6:30-8:00pm Opening Ceremony and Welcome Reception
Monday, May 27
9:15-10:45am Panel 2: Migration and Colonization: Unsettled Archives
Chair: Fredrik Thomasson (Uppsala University)
Rosemarijn Hoefte (KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and Caribbean Studies): “Dutch research into the Colonial Past: A Tale of Two Cities”
Elise A. Mitchell (Princeton University): “Smallpox and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World: A Digital History”
Nuala Zahedieh (University of Cambridge): “Canoes and capitalism: an indigenous technology in the early English Caribbean”
10:45-11:00am Coffee Break
11:00am-12:30pm Panel 3: Migration As A Breeding Ground for Resistance
Chair: Gad Heuman (University of Warwick)
Gelien Matthews (University of The West Indies, St. Augustine Campus): “Eliza Fenwick’s Private Account of the Barbados Servile War of 1816”
Heather Freund (University of Copenhagen): “An Island Divided: Maroons, the Kalinago, and the British in St. Vincent”
Gunvor Simonsen (University of Copenhagen): “A Business of Freedom? Marronage and Maritime Transport in the Nineteenth-Century Lesser Antilles”
12:30-1:45pm Lunch
1:45-3:15pm Panel 4: Circulation and Movement: Trade, Labor and Family Networks
Chair: Heather Cateau (University of St. Andrews/UWI)
Sebastian Gómez González (Universidad de Antioquia): “Alias ‘El Mompoxino’ y el negocio del contrabando en el istmo de Panamá y las Antillas, 1730-1746”
Yevan Terrien (University of Louisiana at Lafayette): “Wheel of Misfortune: The Intercolonial Slave Trade between the Caribbean and Colonial Louisiana in the 18th century”
Felicia Fricke (University of Copenhagen): “A Maritime Family Network at St. Barts, 1802-1829”
3:15-3:30pm Coffee Break
3:30pm-5:00pm Panel 5: New Research on Abolition: The Caribbean and West Africa
Chair: TBD
Chair: Suzanne Schwarz (University of Worcester)
Chair: Rebecca Goetz (New York University)
Suzanne Schwarz (University of Worcester): “Interrupted Middle Passages: Tracing the Movements and Identities of ‘Liberated Africans’ Released from Slave Ships Bound for the Caribbean, c. 1808-1819”
Mégane Coulon (Susquehanna University): “Transatlantic Connections: The Caribbean and the Colony of Sierra Leone”
Tuesday, May 28
9:15-10:45am Panel 6: Migration and Reversals of Belonging in the Caribbean Borderlands: Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Garifuna New York, 1850s-Today
Chair: Laura Rosanne Adderley (Tulane University)
Lara Putnam (University of Pittsburgh): “Violence Against Afro-Caribbean Immigrants in Venezuela, 1850-1950: A Regional and Comparative Assessment”
Sharika D. Crawford (United States Naval Academy): “From North End to Pañatown: How the Free Port and Tourism Sector Spurred Migration that Transformed the Colombian Island of San Andrés, 1953 -1972”
Kaysha Corinealdi (Emerson College): “Denationalization in Comparative Perspective: Panama and the Dominican Republic (1941-Present)”
10:45-11:00am Coffee Break
11:00am-12:30pm Panel 7: Transnational Caribbean Actors and the Making of Blackness in the Greater Circum-Caribbean
Chair: Lara Putnam (University of Pittsburgh)
Felix Jean-Louis (University of California): “Exporting the Revolution: Haitians and the Harlem Assemblages for Black Liberation, 1919-1934”
Tyesha Maddox (Fordham University): “Friends of Abyssinia: West Indian Immigrant Mutual Aid Societies and the Impact of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War”
Willie Mack (University of Missouri): “It was an attack on all of us’: Haitians and Black Americans in New York City and the Korean Grocer Boycott”
J. Marlena Edwards (Pennsylvania State University): “An Unintended Modality: American Whaling, Labor, and Race-Making in New Bedford Massachusetts, 1870-1930”
12:30-1:45pm Lunch
1:45-3:15pm Panel 8: Accommodating Practices
Chair: Jenny Shaw (University of Alabama)
Dexnell Peters (University of the West Indies, Mona Campus): “Religious pluralism, missionaries and the integration of the Greater Southern Caribbean in the Revolutionary Era”
Kristen Block (University of Tennessee): “Medicinal Springs in the Early Caribbean: Creole Healing Stories at the Intersection of Medicine and Race”
José Andrés Fernández Montes de Oca (University of Costa Rica): “West Indian Land Tenure in the Costa Rican Caribbean, 1870-1930”
Laura De Moya-Guerra (Rutgers University): “The Chinese in the Barranquilla (Colombia) Carnival: Gender and Diplomacy 1960-1980”
3:15-3:30pm Coffee Break
3:30-5:00pm Panel 9: Reclaiming the Dutch Caribbean Space Within A Larger Regional Historical Context
Chair: Marjoleine Kars (MIT)
Margo Groenewoud (Independent Scholar): “Dutch Caribbean Radicals and the Spaces they Claimed”
Donate B. Philbert-Nieveld (University of Curaçao): “How regional and non-regional migration processes during the mid-nineteenth century influenced religious practices in the (Dutch) Caribbean”
Raimie Richardson, Camiel de Kom, and Arminda Franken-Ruiz (Department of History and Heritage for the Public Entity of St. Eustatius): “Towards Accessibility: Empowering (Dutch) Caribbean communities with diasporic colonial collections”
Wednesday, May 29
9:15-10:45am Panel 10: Rethinking Repatriation: Legacies of Colonial Collecting in the Caribbean
Chair: Alissandra Cummins (Barbados Museum and Historical Society)
Shani Roper (University of the West Indies): “Repatriation, Colonial Collecting and its Impact on National Natural History collections in Jamaica”
Arminda Franken-Ruiz (Independent Heritage Consultant): “The Return of Artifacts from Colonial Collections and its Effect on Museums and their Communities: The case of the National Archaeological Museum of Aruba and the Wereldmuseum in Leiden”
10:45-11:00am Coffee Break
11:00am-12:30pm Panel 11: Choices, Decisions and Policies In A Global Context of Changes
Chair: TBD
Diana Paton (University of Edinburgh) and Juanita de Barros (McMaster University): “Policing Public Space in Post-Slavery British Guiana, 1881-1897”
Anasa Hicks (Florida State University): “Decolonial Decisions: Cuba’s Choice at the Outset of Angolan Independence”
Joy D Lewis (Morgan State University): “The Two Virgin Islands: A Case Study in Transnational Interdependency”