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.

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Justin Dunnavant, 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

The Spring 2024 call received applications from 16 faculty and 22 graduate students across the UC system. The faculty review committee awarded grants to 11 faculty and 10 graduate students from this competitive pool.

Faculty Awards

Kevin Dawson, Black Seaports in the Early Modern Atlantic World, UC Merced

Juan Cobo, Routes of Enslavement in the Highlands of Colombia, UC Santa Barbara

Jessica Millward, My Soul Never Left: Slavery and Ghana in the African American Historical Imagination, UCI

Justin Dunnavant, The Search for the Black Star Line, UCLA

Rachel O'Toole, Enslaved Revolts: Patterns of Rebellion in the Iberian Empires, 16th-19th Centuries, UCI

Manuel Covo, ​​​​​​​Abolishing Fiscal Frontiers: Colonies, Slavery, and Taxation in the Age of the French and Haitian Revolutions, UC Santa Barbara

Giuliana Perrone, ​​​​​​​Rehearsals for Reparations, UC Santa Barbara

Jeffrey Erbig, ​​​​​​​Black Presidiarios and Reclusas, UC Santa Cruz

Genesis Lara, Mobilizing Grief: Dominican Feminisms and Caribbean Human Rights, UCI

Bristin Jones, In the Name of Cacao: Routes of Enslavement in Venezuela’s Costa Aragüeña, UC Merced

David Igler, ​​​​​​​Manuscript Workshop for "Erecting Eden", UCI

Graduate Awards

Viviana Alvarez Rodriguez, ​​​​​​​Post-Revolutionary Migration in Two Afro-Descendant Veracruzan Municipalities, UCI

Karol Alzate, Boga Epistemologies: Rivers, Resistance, and Routes Through Colombia's Pacific and Atlantic Coasts, UC Berkeley

Adrian Bermudez Perez, ​​​​​​​Livable Worlds: Afro-Caribbean Environments in the Nineteenth-Century, UC Berkeley

Marissa ​​​Gavin, Stolen Bodies: Slavery in the Pacific, UCI

Spencer Gomez, Navigating Freedom: Black Diaspora, Foreign Expertise, and Resistance in New Granada, UCI

Jewell Humphrey, ​​​​​​​The Search for the Black Star Line, UCLA

McCord, Elizabeth, The Black Seminoles: Indigeneity, Land, and Race in a Transnational Maroon Community, UC Berkeley

Jungki Min, Alliances and Conflicts: Leadership and Gender Dynamics among Free People of Color in the Haitian Revolution, UC Santa Barbara

Maria del Pilar Ramirez Restrepo, Documenting Routes of Enslavement in Northwestern Colombia, UC Santa Barbara

Andreina Soto, A Place of Paradoxes: Black People's Legal Strategies in Early Modern Venezuela, UC Santa Barbara

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

Kevin Dawson, Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolution, UC Merced

Juan Cobo Betancourt, Routes of Enslavement in the Highlands of Colombia, UC Santa Barbara

Justin Dunnavant, Slavery in the Danish West Indies Archival Research, UC Los Angeles

Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Women of the Trade, UC Berkeley

José Juan Pérez Meléndez, Marronage and “Specialness”:  Processing a Slave Conspiracy in Puerto Rico during the Era of Constitutional Exception, UC Davis

Anthony Jerry, Recipes for Recognition: An Anthropological Cookbook, UC Riverside

Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, Tracing Haiti’s Source of Black Pride as opposed to Venezuelan and Spanish American Narratives of Mestizaje/Whitening, 1823-1860, UC Santa Barbara

Rachel O'Toole, Free Subjects of Colonial Peru, UC Irvine

Manuel Covo, The Treasurer's Tale: A Lost Account of War, White Supremacy and Black Radicalism in the Haitian Revolution, UC Santa Barbara

Jessica Millward, My Soul Never Left: Slavery and Ghana in the African American Historical Imagination, UC Irvine

Roberto Strongman, The Black Christ on the Route of Enslavement, UC Santa Barbara

Graduate Awards

Miguel Novoa, Black Skins Are Bulletproof: The "Conditional Liberty Paradox" and Freedpeople's Liberation from Re-Enslavement in Guano-Era Peru, 1854-1869, UC Davis

Karol Alzate, Reading Maps in Palenque: Tracing the Moves of Cimarron Geographies in Colombia, UC Berkeley

Marina Dadico Amâncio de Souza, Maroon Communities and Intra-American Slave Trade: Establishing Hemispheric Dialogues, UC Santa Cruz

Wyatt Wiggins, "...We are always present:" Branding the Enslaved in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue, UC Irvine.

Alabama, Madison Aubey, Legacies of Collectivity in Africatown, UC Los Angeles

Jungki Min, Revolutionary Networks of Free People of Color in the Late Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean: Masculinity, Social Dynamics, and Political Ideologies, UC Santa Barbara

Lucayo Casillas, Blood on the Gold Coast: Warfare, Trade, and Enslavement in Seventeenth Century West Africa, UC Berkeley

Bree Booth, Que(e)rying Legacies of Slavery: Intimate Entanglements between Oral Histories from Cartagena and San Basilio and the Colonial Archive of Colombia, UC Santa Cruz

Nicole Smith, Wagaira Le / This is Our Village: Reclaiming the Heritage & History of the First Garífuna Settlement in Central America, UC Los Angeles