The UC MRPI project “Routes of Enslavement in the Americas,” led by co-PIs Alex Borucki (UCI), Gregory O’Malley (UCSC), and Sabrina Smith (UCM), intends to enlarge the network of collaborating scholars and students within the UC system to expand the investigation of the traffic of African and African-descended captives to include trafficking in the Black Pacific (in the coasts from California to Chile), within colonial Mexico (including California), as well as an investigation of the migration of free and enslaved people from the Caribbean islands to the mainland Americas. To accomplish this goal, we will award research grants for ladder-rank faculty and graduate students from all the UC campuses engaged in the study of the African Diaspora in Spring 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Justin Dannavant, UCLA, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
2023 and 2024 grant recipient
Justin doing mapping work in the Florida Keys together with Diving with a Purpose
and The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
Grants Awarded
The Spring 2025 call received applications from 10 faculty and 20 graduate students across the UC system. The faculty review committee awarded grants to eight faculty and twelve graduate students from this competitive pool.
FACULTY AWARDS
Rachel O'Toole, Enslaved Parents: Protection and Care Work in Colonial Peru, UC Irvine
Jessica Millward, My Soul Never Left: Slavery and Ghana in the African American Historical Imagination, UC Irvine
Kevin Dawson, Black Waterfronts, UC Merced
Ayasha Guerin, Slavery and Fugitivity in New England’s Whaling Archipelago, UCLA
Anthony Jerry, The Pacific as a Black Geography, UC Riverside
Dana Velasco Murillo, Within Diasporas: Afro-Chichimeca Unions in New Spain, UC San Diego
Manuel Covo, Paper-Money, Slavery, and Taxation in the French Colonies in the Age of Revolutions, UC Santa Barbara
Juan Cobo Betancourt, Routes of Enslavement in the Highlands of Colombia, UC Santa Barbara
GRADUATE AWARDS
Wyatt Wiggins, Under the Branding Iron: Marking, Identification, and Policing in the French Empire, 1770-1805, UC Irvine
Berenice Tepozano, Politics of Reproduction: Contestation of African-Descent Mothers in Bourbon Mexico City, 1740-1810, UC Irvine
Marissa Gavin, Ordering Oceania: Nineteenth Century French Empire in the South Pacific, UC Irvine
Arielle Steimer-Barragan, Beyond the Ink That Binds: Black and Indigenous Forced Labor in the Production of Letters, 1539–1781, UC Irvine
William Carter, Navigating Black Waters and White Fears: Re-thinking Risk, Rebellion, and Racialisation in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, UC Berkeley
Gabriel Lesser, Gaming the System: Afro-Brazilian lottery associations and manumission, UC Berkeley
Yasmine Benabdallah, The one with the manes: Relating archives, rituals, and ocean worldviews through decolonial moving image practices and translocal conversations in Morocco and Brazil, UC Santa Cruz
Thomas Paniagua, Necro Racial Capitalism: An Examination of Labor in the California Borderlands, UC Merced
Andreina Soto, A Place of Paradoxes: Black People’s Legal Strategies in Early Modern Venezuela, UC Santa Barbara
Lizzie McCord, Freedom in the Florida Borderlands: Black and Seminole Freedom in the Florida Territory, UC Berkeley,
Jungki Min, Weaponizing the Republic: Leadership Struggles between free mixed-race and free Black leaders during the Haitian Revolution, UC Santa Barbara
Grecia Perez, Surveillance, Blackness, and the Black Mexican Experience in Conservation Economies, UC Riverside