About Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talks
Free. No need to book, just drop-in.
The Summer Scholars season of lunchtime talks is hosted by the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the British Library and showcases the exciting and wide-ranging research into the Library’s Americas collections by the Institute’s Visiting Fellows and associates, as well as Library staff.
Anglophone Caribbean Writers at Cuba's Casa de las Américas
Cuba's cultural institute Casa de las Américas provided an important decolonial space for mid-century Caribbean writers George Lamming and Andrew Salkey, among many others. Emily Taylor explains how Casa supported these writers – introducing them to hispanophone audiences throughout Spain and Latin America through translations of their work and hosting them at conferences in Cuba. Salkey's Havana Journal chronicled how Cuba figured for these writers during a time of Cold War tensions and the U.S. embargo in the 1960s.
British archives and Caribbean plantations: journeys through enslavement and freedom
Using 18th-century documents, archaeological field sites, and critical fabulation, Edith Gonzalez chases individual stories across oceans and islands.
More information
About the speakers
Emily Taylor is Professor of World Literature and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and has published essays in Caribbean-Irish Connections, The Journal of West Indian Literature, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, The Southern Quarterly, the Cambridge series Caribbean Literature in Transition and Ms. Magazine.
Edith Gonzalez is an historical anthropologist whose research encompasses multiple methodologies; primarily archaeological, ethnographic (working with descendant communities), and historical. Her fieldwork takes her to archaeological sites in the Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, and archival sites in the United Kingdom. Her decades of museum work at the American Museum of Natural History, international science/history museums, and regional children's museums, informs her teaching in the Critical Museum Studies Program
About the Eccles Institute
The Eccles Institute builds, curates and preserves the Americas and Oceania contemporary collection at the Library and champions knowledge and understanding of these regions through a rich programme of fellowships and awards, cultural events, research training, guides to the collections and initiatives for schools.
For more information about the Institute and our collections, contact eccles-institute@bl.uk or visit our blog.
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