Events, Lectures, News
Elizabeth J. West
(Georgia State University)
June 25, 2019
4 p.m.-6 p.m., Philosophicum I, P207
From 1739–1748 the centuries long dispute between Britain and Spain over contested territories in present day Florida and Georgia heightened into the conflict that became known as The War of Jenkins’s Ear. This land based dispute spilled over into the high seas as both sides seized one another’s ships across the Atlantic. While the captors seized and claimed all goods and merchandise, what fate awaited the passengers of these unfortunate ambushes at sea? In the case of one Heinrich Süsstrunck (later Sistrunk), emigrating from his Swiss-German home in 1743, it meant a two year stopover in Cuba before he and the other captives would be rescued and delivered to South Carolina in 1746.
There is a glaring irony in the story of Heinrich. Captured at sea, taken to a foreign destination and held captive for two years, he arrived in Charleston a free man with an apprentice at his side. This point of arrival would begin a legacy of generations of white Sistrunks who would claim and enslave generations of blacks in the U.S. South. While Spanish adversaries may have held Heinrich captive in Cuba for two years, he left there indoctrinated into the new world plantation system and the reality that his whiteness was capital in this hemisphere. Though Spain and Britain were at odds over territories in the new world, Heinrich’s experience in Cuba and his acclimation by the time he arrived in Charleston speaks to the borderless trans-Atlantic world that was connected through slavery.
From the trajectory of Heinrich Sistrunk’s Cuban detainment and deliverance to South Carolina and the territorial expansion of his heirs, this lecture examines the borderlessness of the plantocracy of the Americas, and how this inter-colonial system laid pathways of contrasting generational fortunes for Heinrich’s heirs and the descendants of Shadrick and Francis, two of the many blacks recorded in nineteenth century Sistrunk slave ledgers.
Elizabeth J. West received her Ph.D. in English with a certificate in Women’s Studies from Emory University. Her teaching and scholarship focuses on spirituality and gender in early African American and Women’s Literature, and African Diasporic Literatures of the Atlantic World. She co-edits the Roman & Littlefield book series, Black Diasporic Worlds: Origins and Evolutions from New World Slaving. She is the author of African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: (Lexington Books 2011), coeditor of Literary Expressions of African Spirituality (Lexington Books 2013). Her works can be found in critical anthologies and in journals such as MELUS, Amerikastudien, CLAJ, PALARA, JCCH, Womanist, Black Magnolias, and South Central Review. Her 2012 article, “From David Walker to President Obama: Tropes of the Founding Fathers in African American Discourses of Democracy, or the Legacy of Ishmael” was recognized among “Featured Articles” in American Studies Journals: A Directory of Worldwide Resources.
You can download the poster for the event here.
Events, Lectures, News
Brenden Rensink (Brigham Young University)
June 11, 2019
4-6 p.m., P 207 (Philosophicum)
Drawing from his recent award-winning book, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands, historian Brenden W. Rensink will compare the histories of indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Crees who crossed the border from Canada into Montana and Yaquis who migrated across the border into Arizona from Mexico provide unique examples of Native peoples crossing into the United States as laborers, immigrants, and refugees. These histories question how opposing national borders affect and react differently to Native identity, offer new insights into what it has meant to be “indigenous” or an “immigrant,” and complicate familiar narratives in Native American, American West, and Borderlands histories. Rensink’s presentation will hopefully generate as many questions as it answers and urge scholars to reexamine their own research from new angles.
Brenden W. Rensink (Ph.D., 2010) is the Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. His most recent book, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands won the 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book. He is also the co-editor and co-author of four additional books, and author multiple articles, book chapters, and reviews. Rensink is the Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital public history project and as the Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast.
You can download the poster for the event here.
Events, Lectures, News
Ian Afflerbach (University of North Georgia, USA)
June 6, 2019
6-8 p.m.
ROOM CHANGE: 02.102 (Philosophicum II)
This talk examines debates about method in modernist periodical studies and the digital humanities, focusing on recent conversations abount “strong” and “weak” theories of reading. In so doing, the talk would draw on examples from my experience with journals like Partisan Review, The Dial, and Astounding Stories, describing the benefits (and complexities) of conducting research with these journals, as well as teaching with them – a vital benefit of periodical studies that we too often exclude.
Ian Afflerbach is an Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of North Georgia. He teaches and researches in 20th century American literature and politics, modernism and modernist studies, African-American Literature, periodical culture, and the history of ideas.
You can download the poster for the event here. (Please note the room change as indicated above.)
Events, Lectures, News
Jennifer Reimer (University of Graz, Austria)
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
10 a.m.-12 noon
P 109a (Philosophicum)
Transa may originate in Tijuana, but like so many Tijuanese, it is a mobile, border-crossing word. In transa, we hear the echo not only of transaction but also of transnational, transboundary, and many other concepts that have become increasingly popular in cultural studies of the Americas. Transa describes alternate forms of borderlands representation that are ‘transa-national’ and ‘transa-genre.’ Drawing on Montezemolo, Peralta and Yépez’s use of transa, in this chapter, I explore the varied potential of transa as an alternative border encounter—an approach that theorizes how transactions between the material realities of the US-Mexico borderlands and innovative aesthetics (form) produce experimental, transnational cultural texts.
Jennifer Reimer is a Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow (American Studies) at the University of Graz, Austria. Previously Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, Dr Reimer received her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011, and her MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco in 2005. She is the 2011 winner of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars, awarded by the Women’s Committee of the American Studies Association. Her first prose poetry book, The Rainy Season Diaries, was released in 2013 by Quale Press. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Achiote Press, an independent press dedicated to spotlighting underrepresented authors and artists.
You can download the poster for the event here.
Events, Exchange Programs, Lectures, News
David Thomson (Sacred Heart University, CT, USA)
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
4-6 p.m.
P 207 (Philosophicum)
The story of transatlantic finance in the nineteenth century has often been one that fixates largely on a US-British binary. Capital flows between these two nations (increasingly centered around financial instruments pertaining to cotton) have been detailed at length in an array of monographs. While some historians have explored the power of Dutch financiers, especially as it pertained to American railroad stock, little attention has been paid to German financiers in nineteenth century specifically as it pertains to their increasing interest and interconnectedness with the United States. While partly down to a dearth of surviving primary source evidence, the importance and connections between German financiers and American counterparts helps to explain evolving notions of transatlantic finance but also in part the respective rise of these two economies as they eclipsed the British by the early twentieth century. What began as two economies operating on the periphery of a dominant British financial network in the earlier part of the nineteenth century evolved by century’s end. Finance played but one part in this narrative of American and German ascension, but the financing of debt is one window into this critical story of the nineteenth century.
David Thomson is a historian of the 19th century United States with a special focus on the history of capitalism in the Civil War era. Thomson received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and joined the faculty at Sacred Heart in the fall of 2016. He teaches both halves of the United States history survey as well as electives on the American Civil War, Reconstruction, American Capitalism, and United States Foreign Policy.
You can download the poster for the event here.
Events, Lectures, News
Sasha Pimentel (University of Texas at El Paso)
Thursday, May 23, 2019
12 noon – 2 p.m.
003 SR 07 (BKM)
Visit sashapimentel.com/about for more info on Sasha Pimentel.
You can download the poster for the event here.
