Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talks

The Summer Scholars season of lunchtime talks is hosted by the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the Library and showcases the exciting and wide-ranging research into our Americas collections by the Institute’s Visiting Fellows and associates, as well as Library staff. 

Free. No need to book, just drop-in.

Writing Speculative Historical Fiction: Wild Women of the Northwest

Inés G. Labarta discusses the creative process behind her current novel-in-progress. The work examines an alternative version of Spain's colonial past and is set in the imagined 'Northwest Countries', an island-continent in the North Atlantic that the Catholic Monarchy (the novel's version of a decaying Spanish empire in an alternative nineteenth century) is trying, unsuccessfully, to exploit. The story follows the life of an impoverished female commune of settlers led by Yaya. Half messiah and half weaver of stories, Yaya is in contact with the Saints and can bless women so they can have children without male intervention. When Yaya's long-lost daughter comes back, chaos ensues as her carefully crafted mythology and even her powers start to crumble...

Speculating and Reimagining Slavery: A Creative Exploration of the Long Papers

Cherelle Findley explores how creative writers can use speculative fiction to reflect on the legacies of transatlantic enslavement. Focusing on the Library’s Long Papers as a source of inspiration for both a short story and a poem, she discusses the benefits of this genre in reimagining present and past lives. By engaging creatively with the language of an agent of colonialism, the research offers a means by which to reclaim ownership of a contested history – the histories of formerly enslaved people – and to repatriate narratives and stories back to their ancestors.