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.

diver swimming along seabed
 
 
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