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Given its past and present as a site of trans-national contact, conflict, and exchange, New Orleans is the ideal location for scholarly explorations of the Global Gulf. As a conceptual model, the Global Gulf invites scholarly inquiry that blurs traditional geographic, temporal, or disciplinary boundaries. This interdisciplinary conference encourages an examination the very real historical and contemporary networks linking the people and places of the Gulf Coast, Circum-Caribbean, American
south and wider Atlantic World, however it also welcomes scholarship rooted in any
and all geographic locales and time periods.
All events at the conference are free and open to the public.
Walter Johnson is the Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and author of the award winning Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Walter Johnson’s keynote speech for the Global Gulf conference will embed the history of slavery in the U.S. in the histories of global capitalism (especially the cotton trade and the Atlantic money market) and U.S. imperialism (the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War, and the illegal invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s). Paired with a lecture by Edith Wolfe of the Stone Center about Sandra Pani’s exhibition “De Ser Arbol 2008,” the keynote speech, reception, and lecture will tie together the questions about identity formation that are central to thinking about the Gulf in a global and Atlantic context. Professor Johnson's talk will be in Freeman Auditorium, followed by a reception in Woodward Way and Edith Wolfe’s presentation in the Newcomb Gallery. There will be a book display of Professor Johnson's work set up in the reception area.
Professor Johnson's talk headlines a conference about transnational exchange and life in and around the Gulf of Mexico past and present. Tulane's Global Gulf conference will include graduate student presenters from universities around the U.S. on various topics that would be interesting to scholars and students working on the United States South, the Circum-Caribbean, or Latin America. The conference presentations will be on Friday (in Rogers Memorial Chapel) and Saturday (in Hébert 201), February 22nd & 23rd. For a full schedule of panel and conference events to be held on campus, please send an e-mail to globalgulfconference@gmail.com.
The Global Gulf Conference is presented by Tulane's History Graduate Student Association with generous funding and support from GSSA, the Gulf South Center, the History Department, the Murphy Institute, The D. W. Mitchell Lecture Series and the Provost's Faculty Seminars in Interdisciplinary Research, the Interdisciplinary Committee for Arts and Visual Culture, the English Department, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Payson Center, and the Department of Anthropology.
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