Participants

Yarimar Bonilla

… teaches and writes about questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and race across the Americas. Her first book, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment, examines how contemporary activists in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe imagine and contest the limits of postcolonial sovereignty. Professor Bonilla’s second book project American Disaster—for which she was named a 2018 Carnegie Fellow—examines the politics of recovery in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria and the forms of political and social trauma that the storm revealed. She is also at work on an ethnographic study of the Puerto Rican pro-statehood movement, tentatively titled “The Unthinkable State,” which considers annexationism as a form of anti-colonial politics. Professor Bonilla has a strong interest in the role of digital technologies within social movements and academic practice. She has theorized hashtag usage within the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and the semiotics of digital protest in the context of Guadeloupe. She is currently developing a multi-media political atlas of the Caribbean entitled, Visualizing Sovereignty and is a principal collaborator in the #PuertoRicoSyllabus project.

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Vincent Brown

… is Charles Warren Professor of American History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Founding Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic world. Brown is the author of numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he is Principal Investigator and Curator for the animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2013), and he was Producer and Director of Research for the award-wining television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), broadcast nationally on season 11 of the PBS series Independent Lens. His first book, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008), was co-winner of the 2009 Merle Curti Award and received the 2009 James A. Rawley Prize and the 2008-09 Louis Gottschalk Prize. His next book, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, will be published by Harvard University Press in January 2020.

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Holly Bynoe

… is a curator, visual artist, cultural instigator and writer from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. She is currently living and working in Nassau, The Bahamas. Bynoe is the co-founder and director of ARC Magazine, the premiere visual art and culture publication focusing on contemporary work created throughout the Caribbean and its diaspora, which included a dynamic digital component. As Executive Director of ARC Magazine, Bynoe organised and curated various exhibitions across the Caribbean and the diaspora in collaboration with several formal and informal art spaces including the trinidad+tobago film festival, The Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. and Transforming Spaces among others. She is co-founder and co-­director of Caribbean Linked, a regional residency program in Aruba and co-founder and co­-director of Tilting Axis, an annual meeting charting arts activism and non­profit models of connectivity, education and sustainability across the region. She is currently conducting research on interdisciplinary practices across the Global Caribbean with a focus on moving image and photography, and has been working as Chief Curator of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas since April 2015.

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Marlene L. Daut

… is Professor of American Studies & Carter Woodson Institute Associate Director at the University of Virginia. She specializes in pre-20th-century Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Her first book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865, was published in 2015 by Liverpool University Press’ Series in the Study of International Slavery. Her second book, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism, was published in fall 2017 from Palgrave Macmillan’s series in the New Urban Atlantic. She is also working on a collaborative project entitled, An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (Age of Slavery), which is under contract with the University of Virginia Press. Daut is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti. She also curates La Gazette Royale d’Hayti, on early Haitian print culture at, and has developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900.

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Laurent Dubois

… is Professor of Romance Studies and History and is the founder and Faculty Director of the Forum for Scholars & Publics at Duke University. From 2010 to 2013, he was the co-director of the Haiti Laboratory of the Franklin Humanities Institute. He has written about the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean, with Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (2004), which won four book prizes including the Frederick Douglass Prize. His 2012 Haiti: The Aftershocks of History was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has also written about the politics of soccer, with Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (2010) and The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer (2018). His work on the cultural history of music, The Banjo: America’s African Instrument (2016), was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Fellowship, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. His most recent book is Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), co-authored with Richard Turits. His writings on music, history and sport have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, Sports Illustrated, and he tweets as @Soccerpolitics.

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Schuyler Esprit

… is a writer and editor, research consultant, and youth advocate. She is the Director of Create Caribbean Research Institute at Dominica State College, the first Digital Humanities center in the Caribbean. She is a scholar of Caribbean literature and cultural studies, and postcolonial theory and has also taught and held professional positions at a number of universities in the United States. She has also worked as the Editor of Dominica’s longest running newspaper, The Chronicle. She is now completing her book, entitled “West Indian Readers: A Social History” and its digital companion, both of which are historical explorations of reading culture in the Caribbean. She has also written the introduction to the 2016 Papillote Press edition of The Orchid House, the 1953 novel by Dominican writer Phyllis Shand Allfrey. She is currently Dean of Academic Affairs at Dominica State College.

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Annette Joseph-Gabriel

… is a scholar of francophone literature, culture, and politics. Currently an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, her research focuses on race, gender, and citizenship in the French-speaking Caribbean, Africa, and France. Her book, “Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Political Imagination in the French Empire” is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press as part of the New Black Studies series. It examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Essays from this and other research projects have appeared in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Women in French Studies, Nouvelles Études Francophones, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal for Slave and Post-Slave Studies, and The French Review. Her research has been supported by several awards including an American Philosophical Society fellowship, the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics, and the Annette Kolodny Award by the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages. She is the managing editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International (SUNY Press). She is also the site author for several digital projects, notable among which is her interactive mapping visualization, Digitizing Diaspora.

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Versia Harris

… is a Barbadian artist. She received her BFA in Studio Art in 2012. She volunteered at a number of art organizations, including Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. and Punch Creative Arena while also teaching at Barbados Community College. She has done a number of residences in the Caribbean and North and South America, including Vermont Studios Center, Vermont and Alice Yard residency, Trinidad. In 2014, Versia’s work was featured in the IV Moscow International Biennial for Young Art themed “A Time for Dreams” and was subsequently selected to be apart of the follow up exhibition MOMENTUM_InsideOut screening of “A Time For Dreams” in Berlin. Her first solo show in 2015 in Barbados was titled “This Quagmire.” She was awarded a Fulbright Laspau Scholarship in 2017 and received her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan USA in May, 2019, where she was also earned a Mercedes-Benz Financial Services New Beginnings Award.

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Jessica Marie Johnson

… is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition,The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and *Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco)** and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections. She is Founding Curatrix at African Diaspora, Ph.D. or #ADPhD, co-organizer of the Queering Slavery Working Group with Dr. Vanessa Holden (University of Kentucky), a member of the LatiNegrxs Project, and a Digital Alchemist at the Center for Solutions to Online Violence. At Johns Hopkins University, Johnson is co-convener of the Black World Seminar (launch: Fall 2019) with Drs. Nathan Connolly, Larry Jackson, and Martha Jones as well as convener of the Sex and Slavery Lab (2018-2019). She is on the board of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. As a historian and Black Studies scholar, Johnson researches black diasporic freedom struggles from slavery to emancipation. As a digital humanist, Johnson explores ways digital and social media disseminate and create historical narratives, in particular, comparative histories of slavery and people of African descent. She is the recipient of research fellowships and awards from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Richards Civil War Era Center and Africana Research Center at the Pennsylvania State University.

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Frances Negrón-Muntaner

… is a filmmaker, writer, scholar and professor at Columbia University, where she is also the founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive. Among her books and publications are: Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism in Native Nations and Latinx America (2017). Her most recent films include Small City, Big Change (2013), War for Guam (2015) and Life Outside (2016). For her work, Negrón-Muntaner has received Ford, Truman, Rockefeller, and Pew fellowships. In 2008, the United Nations’ Rapid Response Media Mechanism recognized her as a global expert in the areas of mass media and Latin/o American studies. She is also recipient of the Lenfest Award, one of Columbia University’s most prestigious recognitions for excellence in teaching and scholarship (2012); an inaugural OZY Educator Award (2017), the Latin American Studies Association’s 2019 Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual Award, and the 2019 Media Trailblazer Award from the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. In 2019, she launched Valor y Cambio, an art, digital storytelling and just economy project in Puerto Rico and New York for which she was awarded the 2019 Premio Borimix from the Society for Educational Arts in New York.

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Roopika Risam

… is an Associate Professor of Secondary and Higher Education and English at Salem State University, where she also serves as Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies, Coordinator of the Combined B.A./M.Ed. in English Education, and Interim Coordinator of the M.A. in English. Her research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, digital humanities, and new media. Her first monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018, and she is co-editing two volumes: Intersectionality in Digital Humanities with Barbara Bordalejo for Arc Humanities Press and The Digital Black Atlantic with Kelly Baker Josephs for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press). Along with Carol Stabile, she is co-director of Reanimate, an intersectional feminist publishing collective recovering archival writing by women in media activism. Her scholarship has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, First Monday, Popular Communications, and College and Undergraduate Libraries, among others. A former member of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH) and Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) executive boards, she was co-chair of the ACH 2019 conference. Additionally, she recently received the Massachusetts Library Association’s Civil Liberties Champion Award for her work promoting equity and justice in the digital cultural record.

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Ruddy Roye

… is a Brooklyn based documentary photographer specializing in editorial and environmental portraits and photo-journalism photography. A photographer with over twelve years of experience, Radcliffe is inspired by the raw and gritty lives of grass-roots people, especially those of his homeland of Jamaica. Radcliffe strives to tell the stories of their victories and ills by bringing their voices to matte fibre paper. Recently, Radcliffe began experimenting with interpretative photography, preferring to allow the abstract content within the frame to dictate the voice and purpose of the image. His Elements series focuses on the bold, austere, graphic and emotionally raw imagery, that is trapped behind a diffused lens. With painterly abilities, Radcliffe uses this diffused methodology to subtly awake the subconscious and expose the isolated figure or vision painted within a rhetorical frame.