Speakers

    Keynote Speakers

    Susan Buck-Morss
      Unable to attend

    Rupert Roopnaraine
      holds a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. Recruited by Walter Rodney with whom he worked closely to return to Guyana, he became the co-leader of the Working People's Alliance. He has also served as an MP in Guyana.  He is the author of The Primacy of the Eye: The Art of Stanley Greaves; Web of October: Rereading Martin Carter; and a book of poetry entitled Suite for Supriya.  He has also made a film on political memory entitled "The Terror and the Time."

    Other Confirmed Speakers

    Jerome Branche
      is Associate Professor of Latin American and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.  His recent publications include Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature and the edited volumes of Lo que teníamos que tener: raza y revolución en Nicolás Guillén, Diversity across the Curriculum: A Practical Guide for Faculty, and Race, Colonialism, and Social Transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean.  He currently serves as the Secretary/Treasurer of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. 

    John Beverley
      is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.   His recent publications include Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth and Subalternity and Representation. Arguments in Critical Theory.  His recent edited works include From Cuba and La voz del otro: Testimonio, subalternidad y verdad narrativa.  He has also served as Visiting Professor at University of California-San Diego, Stanford University, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, University of Minnesota, and University of Washington. 

    O. Nigel Bolland
    • is Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology and Caribbean Studies Emeritus at Colgate University.  His recent publications include The Politics of Labour in the British Caribbean: The Social Origins of Authoritarianism and Democracy in the Labour Movement; Struggles for Freedom: Essays on Slavery, Colonialism and Culture in the Caribbean and Central America; and On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934-39.  He has also taught at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.
  • Yarimar Bonilla
    • is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she researches and teaches in the areas of Caribbean Studies, New World Studies, Political Anthropology, and the Anthropology of History and Memory. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, entitled A Striking Past: Labor and the Politics of History in the French Antilles, which presents an ethnographic analysis of contemporary labor movements and the battles over collective memory in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
  • Merle Collins 
    • is a Grenadian novelist and poet, and a Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland at College Park.  Collins has also taught in London and Grenada and served in Grenada's Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the Grenadian Revolution.  Her publications include the novels Angel  and The Colour of Forgetting, as well as a collection of short stories, Rain Darling. She has also published two volumes of poetry: Because the Dawn Breaks and Rotten Pomerack. A specialist in Caribbean studies, her critical works include "Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today" in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World  (Helen Carr, ed.; Pandora, 1989), and "To be Free is Very Sweet" in Slavery and Abolition.
  • Kathleen Musante DeWalt
    • is Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University Center for International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a medical anthropologist whose main research interests are in the anthropology of food and nutrition. In particular she has interests in the health and nutrition impacts of economic and agricultural development policies in Latin America; health and nutrition of indigenous peoples of the Amazon, child survival and adult health in developing countries; and health decision making in pluralistic settings. She has carried out research in Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, Ecuador, and Kentucky. Her current research includes a 20 year social history of two women's productive associations in the Ecuadorian Province of Manabí and a study of traditional manioc processing of the Quichua people of the Ecuadorian Province of Napo.
  • Luis Duno-Gottberg
    • is Associate Professor of Caribbean Literature and Cultural Studies at Rice University. He was Director of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at Florida Atlantic University, and taught at Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. His current research, Dangerous People, explores the relationship between popular mobilization and representation in Venezuela. He is the author of: Cultura e identidad racial en América Latina. Revista Estudios (Universidad Simón Bolívar, 2002),Solventando las diferencias. La ideología del mestizaje en Cuba (Iberoamericana, 2003), Imagen y Subalternidad. El Cine de Víctor Gaviria (Cinemateca Nacional de Venezuela, 2003), Miradas al margen. Cine y Subalternidad en América Latina(Cinemateca Nacional de Venezuela, Forthcoming 2009), La humanidad como mercancía.  (El Nacional, Forthcoming 2009).
    Elizabeth Dore
      is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Southampton, UK. She directed Memories of the Cuban Revolution, a large oral history project carried out in Cuba, the first of its kind since a similar study led by Oscar Lewis was closed down in 1970. She is completing a book, Cubans’ Lives: Voices from the Revolution, based on the 100+  in-depth interviews she and a team of 8 Cuban and 2 British researchers carried out across the island from 2004 to 2008. Her last book, Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua (Duke University Press, 2006) /Mitos de Modernidad: Tierra, Peonaje y Patriarcado en Granada, Nicaragua (Managua, 2008) examines the historical roots of the Sandinista Revolution. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the the Latin American Studies Center, Harvard University. For details see: www.soton.ac.uk/ml/profiles/dore.html
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  • Juan Duchesne-Winter
    • is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Pittsburgh.  His recent publications include Del príncipe moderno al señor barroco: la república de la amistad en Paradiso, de José Lezama Lima, ‘Equilibrio encimita del infierno’: Andrés Caicedo y la utopía del trance, and Fugas incomunistas.  He also serves as Director of Publications of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana and the Institute’s journal, Revista Iberoamericana.  He has also served as Chair of the Department of Spanish at the University of Puerto Rico and has co-founded the independent journals, Postdata and Nómada, in Puerto Rico. 
  • Alex Dupuy
    • is Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University.  He is the author of Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700, Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution, and The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti.  He also has appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and is a frequent commentator on Haitian affairs on the BBC’s Caribbean Service.
  • Norman Girvan
    • is Professorial Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International Relations at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.  His recent publications include the book Cooperation in the Greater Caribbean, The Role of the Association of Caribbean States; as well as journal articles, "Whither CSME?"; "W.A. Lewis, the Plantation School and Dependency: An Interpretation", and "Caribbean Dependency Thought Revisited".  He has been Secretary General of the Association of Caribbean States, Professor of Development Studies and Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies, and head of the National Planning Agency of the Government of Jamaica.  In December 2008, he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Havana, Cuba. 
    Samuel Farber
      is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.  He is the author of The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered; Social Decay and Transformation: A View from the Left; Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy; and Revolution and Reaction in Cuba: 1933-1960.  He was born and raised in Cuba, and is also a member of the editorial board of the socialist journal, Against the Current. 

  • Cecilia Green
    • is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.  Among her  most recent publications are several journal articles: "Hierarchies of Whiteness in the Geographies of Empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barretts of Jamaica, " "Between Respectability and Self-Respect: Framing Afro-Caribbean Women's Labor History", "'A Civil Inconvenience'? The Vexed Question of Slave Marriage in the British West Indies", and "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Mercantilism and Free Trade". 

  • Rafael Hernandez
    • is the editor of Temas, a Cuban quarterly in the field of history, culture, economics, and politics.  His most recent publications are Looking at Cuba: Essays on Culture and Civil Society; Outside the Glass Urn: Social Thought and Culture in Cuba Today; and The History of Havana (coauthored with D. Cluster).  He has been Professor and Researcher at the University of Havana and the High Institute of International Relations, Director of U.S. Studies at the Centro de Estudios sobre América, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Instituto Cubano de Investigación Cultural “Juan Marinello”, in Havana.  He also has taught as a professor and conducted research at Harvard, Columbia, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Johns Hopkins, the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexico (ITAM), and the University of Puerto Rico.  In 2006, he received the Illiteracy Campaign Medal and the LASA Academic Excellency Award.
  • Jay R. Mandle
    • is the W. Bradford Wiley Professor of Economics at Colgate University. He has taught at the University of the West Indies, at Cave Hill and St. Augustine, and the University of Guyana. He has published widely on the economic development of the Caribbean and globalization. His most recent book is Democracy, America and the Age of Globalization. He is also the author of Big Revolution, Small Country: The Rise and Fall of the Grenada Revolution.
    • Shalini Puri
      • works on comparative Caribbean studies and literatures and cultures of the global south.  She is currently researching two books: one on the cultural memory of the Grenadian Revolution and its legacies for egalitarian politics in the region, and a second collaborative book that theorizes the role of fieldwork in the humanities.  Her book The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (2004) won the Gordon and Sybil Lewis Prize in 2005 for best book on the Caribbean.  She edited Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean (Macmillan, 2003). Her work has appeared in Cultural Critique, Small Axe, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, ARIEL, and various anthologies.  She also continues to work on the cultural practices, conflicts, and solidarities which have arisen out of the overlapping diasporas set in motion by slavery and indentureship.
    • Lara Putnam
      • is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.  Her recent publications include Contact Zones: Heterogeneity and Boundaries in Caribbean Central America at the Start of the Twentieth Century, To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World and the edited volume of Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America.  Her current research examines the historical development of public policies impacting British Caribbean youth. 
    • Rafael Rojas
      • is Professor and Researcher at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City and co-director of the literary magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana.  This spring, he is the Tinker Visiting Professor at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He coauthored La independencia. Los libros de la patria and El republicanismo en hispanoamérica. Ensayos de historia intelectual y política.  His latest book, Tumbas sin sosiego. Revolución, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano received the Premio Anagrama.  He also has been Visiting Professor at Princeton University and Columbia University.  
    • Caldwell Taylor
      • is Contributing Editor of Big Drum Nation.  He served as Grenada’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 1980 to 1983 and as Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1982 to 1983.  He also is a former teacher and journalist. 
    • Patricia J. Saunders
      • is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, where she co-directs the Caribbean Literary Studies Program and is Associate Editor of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal. She is also a member of the editorial collective of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.  Her publications include Alien-Nation and Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Music. Memory. Resistance.: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination.  She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Fusion and Con/Fusion: Gender, Sexuality and Consumerism in Caribbean Popular Culture.
    • Alissa Trotz
      • is Associate Professor in Women & Gender Studies and Director of the Caribbean Studies Program at the University of Toronto. Her most recent publications include: the co-edited 2007 Special Issue  of Race and Class commemorating the 200^th anniversary of the abolition  of the British slave trade (with Aaron Kamugisha); the 2007 Dame Nita  Barrow Annual Memorial Lecture, Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean; as well as journal articles “Red Thread: The Politics of Hope”, “Going Global? Transnationality, Women/ Gender Studies, and Lessons from the Caribbean”, “Rethinking Caribbean Transnational Connections: Conceptual Itineraries”, “Between Despair and Hope: Towards an Analysis of Women and Violence in contemporary Guyana”, “Behind the Banner of Culture? Gender, Race, and the Family in Guyana”. She is a member of Red Thread Women’s Development Organisation in Guyana and edits a weekly column, In the Diaspora, in the Guyanese newspaper  the Stabroek Daily News."