Slavery at the Crossroads of Medical knowledge and Science: New perspectives

Department: African American Studies

Date and Time: February 4, 2016 | 10:00 AM-6:00 PM

Event Location: Humanities Gateway 1010

Event Details


Slavery at the Crossroads of Medical knowledge and Science: New perspectives
February 4, 2016, Humanities Gateway 1010 (HG1010)
University of California, Irvine

10:00am: Coffee and registration

10:15 am: Welcome by Georges Van Den Abbeele, Dean of School of Humanities, and Douglas Haynes, Faculty Director, Medical Humanities Initiative

10:30am-12:00pm: The Slave trade and Early Modern Atlantic Knowledge

“A Slaver’s Collection: Medical Knowledge, Natural History, and British Slave Trade”
Kathleen Murphy, Department of History, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

“Enslaved Nosologies: The Invention of Disease in the Early Modern Atlantic”
Pablo Gómez, Department of History of Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Chair: Alex Borucki, History, UCI

Noon-1:30pm: Lunch break

1:30-4:00pm: The Long American 19th Century

“African Recaptives and Racial Science in Nineteenth-Century Slave Trade Suppression”
Sharla Fett, History, Occidental College

“Of Paper Trails and Dirt Eaters: West Indian Medical Knowledge in the Antebellum South”
Rana Hogarth, Department of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“Visions of Freedom in Sickness and in Health”
Gretchen Long, Africana Studies, Williams College

Chair: Jessica Millward, History, UCI

4:00-4:30pm: Coffee break

4:30-6:00pm: Arts & Scholarly Research: The Anarcha Project

Tiffanny Willoughby-Herard (Afam, UCI) and Michele Goodwin (UCI Law and Director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy) will offer commentary on the Anarcha Project (a collaboration based at the University of Michigan). The project combines scholarly research, performance, and poetry to explore the experience and lasting consequence of medical experimentation on enslaved and African American bodies in the nineteenth century.

Chair: Sheron Wray, Dance, UCI.

The conference organizers gratefully acknowledge the generous co-sponsorship of the UC Irvine Humanities Commons, The UCI Medical Humanities Initiative, the Department of History, the Program of African American Studies, the Group for the Study of Early Cultures, all at UCI, and the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.