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 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 2023 call received applications from 20 faculty and 26 graduate students across the UC system. The faculty review committee awarded grants to eleven faculty and nine graduate students from this competitive pool.
FACULTY AWARDS
Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolution, Kevin Dawson, UC Merced
Routes of Enslavement in the Highlands of Colombia, Juan Cobo Betancourt, UC Santa Barbara
Slavery in the Danish West Indies Archival Research, Justin Dunnavant, UC Los Angeles
Women of the Trade, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, UC Berkeley
Marronage and “Specialness”: Processing a Slave Conspiracy in Puerto Rico during the Era of Constitutional Exception, José Juan Pérez Meléndez, UC Davis
Recipes for Recognition: An Anthropological Cookbook, Anthony Jerry, UC Riverside
Tracing Haiti’s Source of Black Pride as opposed to Venezuelan and Spanish American Narratives of Mestizaje/Whitening, 1823-1860, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, UC Santa Barbara
Free Subjects of Colonial Peru, Rachel O'Toole, UC Irvine
The Treasurer's Tale: A Lost Account of War, White Supremacy and Black Radicalism in the Haitian Revolution, Manuel Covo, UC Santa Barbara
My Soul Never Left: Slavery and Ghana in the African American Historical Imagination, Jessica Millward, UC Irvine
The Black Christ on the Route of Enslavement, Roberto Strongman, UC Santa Barbara
GRADUATE AWARDS
Black Skins Are Bulletproof: The "Conditional Liberty Paradox" and Freedpeople's Liberation from Re-Enslavement in Guano-Era Peru, 1854-1869, Miguel Novoa, UC Davis
Reading Maps in Palenque: Tracing the Moves of Cimarron Geographies in Colombia, Karol Alzate, UC Berkeley
Maroon Communities and Intra-American Slave Trade: Establishing Hemispheric Dialogues, Marina Dadico Amâncio de Souza, UC Santa Cruz
"...We are always present:" Branding the Enslaved in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue, Wyatt Wiggins, UC Irvine.
Legacies of Collectivity in Africatown, Alabama, Madison Aubey, UC Los Angeles
Revolutionary Networks of Free People of Color in the Late Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean: Masculinity, Social Dynamics, and Political Ideologies, Jungki Min, UC Santa Barbara
Blood on the Gold Coast: Warfare, Trade, and Enslavement in Seventeenth Century West Africa, Lucayo Casillas, UC Berkeley
Que(e)rying Legacies of Slavery: Intimate Entanglements between Oral Histories from Cartagena and San Basilio and the Colonial Archive of Colombia, Bree Booth, UC Santa Cruz
Wagaira Le / This is Our Village: Reclaiming the Heritage & History of the First Garífuna Settlement in Central America, Nicole Smith, UC Los Angeles