History Seminar: Rethinking Latin American Independence in the Twenty-First Century
Convener(s): Eduardo Posada-Carbo
Speaker(s): Marcela Echeverri, Anthony McFarlane, Kirsten Schultz, Francisco A. Ortega and Cristina Soriano
Marcela Echeverri is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in History, Anthropology and Political Theory. She is currently an Associate Professor of History at Yale University. She has written about Anthropology, gender, and nationalism in mid-twentieth century Colombia; slavery and the law in the Spanish empire; and the history of Indian and black royalists in Latin America’s independence wars. He first book Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780-1825 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016) was the winner of the Michael Jiménez Prize and received honorable mention of the Bolton-Johnson Prize. Echeverri is currently working on a book-length research project that seeks to recast Gran Colombian slavery and anti-slavery between 1820 and 1860 in the hemispheric dimensions of its time.
Anthony McFarlane is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Warwick, UK. His research and numerous publications have focused on the histories of Colombia and Ecuador, seen within the context of the history of the Spanish world in the period c.1700-c.1850. It includes study of Colombia’s economic history during and after the colonial period, the history of rebellions, slavery and crime in the late colonial period, and the movements for independence in the early nineteenth century. He has also been interested in the comparative history of late colonial Spanish America - particularly the viceroyalties of Peru and New Granada - and in British American colonial history. He has done extensive research on the Spanish American wars of independence in the period 1810-1825. Prof. McFarlane is a member of the British Royal Historical Society and of the Academia Colombiana de Historia.
Kirsten Schultz is a historian of Latin America and the Iberian Atlantic. She is currently a Professor in the Department of History at Seton Hall University. Her research focuses on Brazil and the Portuguese empire from 1500 to the 1820s and investigates how people understood, affirmed, and contested the exercise of political authority. Her first book Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro 1808-1821 (Routledge, 2001) examines the ways in which the transfer of the Portuguese royal court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 transformed ideas of monarchy and empire. Her more recent book, From Conquest to Colony: Empire, Wealth, and Difference in 18th Century Brazil (Yale University Press, 2023), examines debates about wealth, difference, and governance and how they informed understandings of Brazil’s status within the eighteenth-century Portuguese empire.
Francisco A. Ortega is full professor in the History Department and director of the Centro de pensamiento Pluralizar la Paz at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá. He specializes in 19th century intellectual and political history in Colombia and Spanish America. Ortega obtained his PhD. from the University of Chicago (2001), where he specialized in Latin American history and critical cultural theory. He has several publications on topics such as Theory and History, History of Peace and Democracy, and the connections between Social Violence, History and Memory in Latin America. He is one of the editors of the five-volume editorial project Historias de lo político en Colombia.
Cristina Soriano is Associate Professor of Colonial Latin American History at Department of History and Associated faculty of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Soriano’s research has focused on the analysis of dynamics of circulation of information, social networks, political mobilization, and public sphere in the Spanish Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions. Her first book Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 2018) received the 2019 Bolton-Johnson Award by the Conference of Latin American History and the 2020 Fernando Coronil Award. She is working on a new book project on imperial transition in the Island of Trinidad during the Age of Revolutions.
