LAC History Seminar Series: Cuba: An American History

Convener: Eduardo Posada-Carbó, University of Oxford

Speaker: Ada Ferrer, New York University

Discussant: Alan Knight, Latin American Centre

To join online, please register in advance:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMpdOiprTgqHN0a9G8L6oooydY7ExwPWe2-   

Ada Ferrer, an award-winning writer and historian, is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, winner of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association. Her most recent book, Cuba: An American History, published by Scribner, is both a history of the island from before Columbus to the present, as well as a reflection on the relationship between personal stories and national and transnational histories. She wrote much of the book while in residence at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Alan Knight, former Professor of Latin American History at Oxford University, is an Emeritus Fellow of the Latin American Centre. His chief interest is twentieth-century Latin American history, with a focus on Mexico, agrarian society, state-building and revolutions. He is the author of The Mexican Revolution (2 vols, Cambridge, 1986) US-Mexican Relations, 1910-40 (San Diego, 1987); of the chapter on Mexico, 1930-1946, in The Cambridge History of Latin America (Vol. VII, 1990); and of two volumes of a three volume general history of Mexico, Mexico: From the Beginning to the Conquest, and Mexico: The Colonial Era (Cambridge, 2002). He has written several articles dealing with aspects of twentieth-century Mexico (state-building, popular movements, education and culture, current politics) and co-edited The Mexican Petroleum Industry in the 20th Century (1992). He previously taught at the University of Essex and the University of Texas at Austin, where he held the C.B. Smith Chair, and in 1986 was a visiting fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego.  His work has been recognized with several awards, including the Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government. In 1986 he was awarded the Albert Beveridge Prize and in 1987 the Bolton Prize from the Conference on Latin American History for his two-volume work on the Mexican Revolution.