Working Groups

Caribbean Studies Working Group  |  Latin American History Speaker Series  |  Latin American Studies Working Group  |  Race and Slavery in the Atlantic World Working Group

Caribbean Studies Working Group

Coordinators: René Kooiker and Ciru Wainaina
This working group is a biweekly forum where graduate students and faculty from a range of
departments at Yale come together to discuss both recent and classic scholarship in our
interdisciplinary field, to read and view creative expressions from the Caribbean (and the
diaspora) ranging from literature to performance art and music, and to welcome colleagues to
share and receive feedback on work in progress. Besides the regular biweekly meeting, which
usually comprises a pre-set reading or a paper workshop, the group organizes talks and events
with scholars and artists from in- and outside of the Yale community. Our language of daily
operation is English, but in our work we do our best to honor the geographic and linguistic
complexity of the Caribbean region and the diaspora as a whole.

Fall 2021 Schedule

09/14

Welcome Back Meeting! - No Reading

09/30*

*irregular Thursday meeting

SPEAKER — Kaiama Glover, A Regarded Self

10/11*

*irregular Monday meeting

SPEAKER — Ren Neyra, The Cry of the Senses

10/26

René Kooiker Paper Workshop

11/9

Ciru Wainaina Paper Workshop

12/7

Reading — Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation OR Paper Workshop
 

Please reach out to René and Ciru directly if you are interested in attending these meetings.

Latin American History Speaker Series

Yale Graduate & Professional School students are invited to join the Latin American Studies Working Group (LASWG) meetings, which will take place via Zoom this semester on Mondays from 12pm to 1pm ET. Papers will be circulated one week before each meeting along with a Zoom link, and the sessions will be dedicated to sharing feedback. Please RSVP to yale.laswg@gmail.com to receive the paper and link.

Spring 2022 LASWG meetings:

You are invited to join the Latin American Studies Working Group (LASWG) meetings.which will take place via Zoom this semester on Mondays from 12pm to 1pm ET. Papers will be circulated one week before each meeting along with a Zoom link, and the sessions will be dedicated to sharing feedback. Please RSVP to yale.laswg@gmail.com to receive the paper and link.

February 7: Vaclav Masek (University of Southern California), “Temporal Imaginations: Collective Memory and Future-Coordination in Post-Conflict Guatemala”

February 21: Sarah Martini, “‘Empty Zone’: Borders and Networks of Exchange in the Highlands of Far Northern Peru c. 2000 – 400 BCE”

February 28: Emilie Egger, TBD

April 18: Jacqueline Ly, “Sovereignty and Possession in 18th-century Belize”

Race and Slavery in the Atlantic World is a working group designed to give faculty and graduate students a forum to present work-in-progress related to Atlantic World slavery. 
 
The working group is open to those interested in slavery and related subjects in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and Africa before 1900. We aim to give participants an opportunity to present book or dissertation chapters, articles-in-progress, or prospectus drafts. Topics include but are not limited to the relationship between slavery and: the state, society, politics, empire, political economy, agriculture, gender, resistance and revolt, abolition, emancipation, and cultural and racial formations. 

We meet on Wednesdays from 6-7:15pm, via Zoom or in-person with a Zoom option. Workshop format is a pre-circulated paper with a moderated discussion. Please contact us to be added to the working group email list. Pre-circulated papers and the Zoom login are only distributed to the group email list. To be added, contact: Teanu Reid at teanu.reid@yale.edu.

Fall 2021 Race and Slavery in the Atlantic Working Group meetings:

  • October 13:  Geneva Smith, PhD candidate in History, Princeton; first-year in Yale Law
  • November 3: Catherine Peters, Postdoctoral Associate in Agrarian Studies, Yale
  • December 1: PhD candidate in African-American Studies and History, Yale

Spring 2022:

  • February 16:  Katheryn Lofton, Professor of Religious Studies, Yale
  • March 2: Nicole Turner, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Yale
  • April 6: Randy Browne, Associate Professor of History, Xavier University
  • April 20: Esteban Salas, Postdoctoral Associate in Agrarian Studies, Yale