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Interview with Jane Landers

Jane Landers is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, former Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Science and past Director of the Center for Latin American Studies. She is the author of Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions which was awarded the Rembert Patrick Book Award and has been awarded honorary mention for the 2011 Bolton Johnson Prize for the best English-language book on any aspect of Latin American History. 

She has also authored Black Society in Spanish Florida, which was awarded the Frances B. Simkins Prize for Distinguished First Book in Southern History and was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. She co-authored the college textbook, The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 and is the editor of Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida and Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas.

She is co-editor of Slaves, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, and The African American Heritage of Florida, which won the Rembert Patrick Book Award and a commendation from the American Society for State and Local History.

She has published essays in The American Historical Review, Slavery and Abolition, The New West Indian Guide, The Americas, Colonial Latin American Historical Review and a variety of anthologies and edited volumes.

Her research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Conference on Latin American History, Vanderbilt University, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Historic St. Augustine Research Institute, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities.

Landers will be giving a free public lecture on "African Kingdoms, Black Republics, and Free Black Towns in the Iberian Penninsula" at 7pm on March 22 in Blount Auditorium as part of the "Communities in Conversation" Series at Rhodes College. Landers' talk traces the evolution of communities of African descent in the Spanish colonial world from their earliest formulations as sixteenth-century African kingdoms established in remote locales in Hispaniola and Colombia through their last vestiges as free black towns in eighteenth century Mexico and Florida. Landers thus opens a world of black agency and resistance to colonial domination during the high tide of slavery.

For information on the lecture, visit the Communities in Conversation website.

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