UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Building on the work of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project this paper will explore the role of the slave-owners in making 'race'. The idea of 'the negro', of 'the slave' and of 'the white man' had to be constructed in the new world of the Atlantic. It was effected through a wide variety of practices - from the selling of African men and women to the making of laws, the discursive cons...

In 1817, the black radical author and orator Robert Wedderburn laid out his plan to overthrow slavery and establish a utopia of freedom and political equality in Jamaica, exporting the ideals of British radicalism to the enslaved there.

Examining slave emancipation in Colombia in the 1850s and its aftermath offers numerous new ways to think about citizenship in former societies-with-slaves. With only 17,000 souls in bondage at the end of legal slavery in 1852, the republic of New Granada (soon to be renamed Colombia) would appear at first glance to have experienced emancipation in a minor key in comparison to the great slavocraci...

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Ecuador, the seminar examines how Kichwa and Tsachila women have come to understand, critique and offer alternatives to the successive policy models in postcolonial development. Understanding indigenous women as critical theorists of development offers the change to examine how development, in its more global as well as more local formulations, has failed to engag...

Crime fiction was one of the most popular genres in Mexico during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Through an examination of some famous and other relatively unknown authors, this talk explores the defining condition for the genre in Mexico: the skepticism of readers and authors toward the police and the justice system. How can these stories work if the truth is always elusive and just...

Beyond the Trachtenberg Paradigm: New Approaches to Popular and Learned Traditions of Magic in Medieval Europe - Dr Katelyn Mesler. Part of the Workshop 'Science versus popular culture in medieval Jewish society' on 9 November 2015, organised by the ERC Calendars Project at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, UCL. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/research/research-pro/calendars-antiquity-...

Medieval Jewish traditions on memorization in medical and magical texts, Prof Gerrit Bos. Part of the Workshop 'Science versus popular culture in medieval Jewish society' on 9 November 2015, organised by the ERC Calendars Project at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, UCL. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/research/research-pro/calendars-antiquity-middle-ages Prof. Gerrit Bos discusses med...

This book consists of two journals kept while the author was carrying out fieldwork in Jamaica. Research in Kingston and visits to rural communities in 1961 are detailed before the reader is taken into the political underworld of black racism and Marxism, where the machinations of the various political groups involved lead up to the Federal Referendum – and Jamaica’s withdrawal from the Federation...

Conquered in 1760 and abandoned by France in 1763, the Province of Quebec entered the British Empire, and Canadiens became subjects of George III alongside their longstanding enemy, Britain's American colonists. Over the next decade, Quebec would adjust itself to a new role on a transformed continent but assessing the relationship between the new province and its British American neighbors is comp...

'Theory, Allegory and Practice in Medieval Alchemy: Jewish Sources and their Context' - Dr Gabriele Ferrario, Cambridge. Part of the Workshop 'Science versus popular culture in medieval Jewish society' on 9 November 2015, organised by the ERC Calendars Project at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, UCL. www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/rese…iquity-middle-ages In this presentation, Dr Gabriele Fe...

'Scientific and popular calendars in medieval Jewish sources' - Dr Nadia Vidro, UCL. Part of the Workshop 'Science versus popular culture in medieval Jewish society' on 9 November 2015, organised by the ERC Calendars Project at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, UCL. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/research/research-pro/calendars-antiquity-middle-ages Dr Nadia Vidro’s talk looks at the...

'Jewish Law and Popular Custom in Medieval Ashkenaz' - Professor Ephraim Kanarfogel, New York. Part of the Workshop 'Science versus popular culture in medieval Jewish society' on 9 November 2015, organised by the ERC Calendars Project at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, UCL. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/research/research-pro/calendars-antiquity-middle-ages Particularly for areas o...

'Women and common folk in medieval Jewish calendar texts' - Professor Sacha Stern, UCL. Part of the Workshop 'Science versus popular culture in medieval Jewish society' on 9 November 2015, organised by the ERC Calendars Project at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, UCL. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/research/research-pro/calendars-antiquity-middle-ages The dates of the Jewish calenda...

Classical versus popular mathematics in medieval Hebrew mathematical and calendrical treatises - Dr Ilana Wartenberg, UCL. Part of the Workshop 'Science versus popular culture in medieval Jewish society' on 9 November 2015, organised by the ERC Calendars Project at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, UCL. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/research/research-pro/calendars-antiquity-middle-ag...

Shortly after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Daniel Patrick Moynihan authored a government report titled The Negro Family: A Case for National Action that captured the attention of President Lyndon Johnson. The report's central argument that poor families headed by single mothers inhibited African American progress touched off a heated controversy. The long-running dispute over Moynihan's conclusions...

Get a feel for what cinema-going was like in 1960s Britain ahead of the main event with Professor Melvyn Stokes at UCL on Tuesday 2 December. Full details on this Inaugural Lecture and how to reserve your place can be found on our website: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/new-waves-love-seats-ciggies-and-kia-ora-memories-of-1960s-cinema-and-cinema-going-in-britain-tickets-19123641326

Civil war scenarios with one rebel group fighting the government have become rare. Instead, we encounter situations with multiple violent non-state groups whose economic and political motivations are blurred as well as changing over time. Exposed to a decade-old armed conflict and geo-strategic for the global cocaine business, Colombia’s borderlands are paradigmatic for this convergence of conflic...

The American Civil War, Thomas D'Arcy McGee declared in 1864, is 'a true continental crisis; it is a Canadian crisis as well as a Republican crisis, and we can no more escape from its consequences than we can throw up a Chinese wall of exclusion instead of the existing boundary lines'. This paper examines the influence of the American Civil War on the creation of the Canadian Confederation, with p...

Men have long been regarded as the leaders of the Morant Bay Rebellion and other post-emancipation protests. For example, Paul Bogle and George William Gordon are honoured for their involvement in the Rebellion. But it is also important to remember that women played a prominent role in the outbreak at Morant Bay as well as in other post-emancipation protests.

The Agrarian Reform was the most important process of social change in twentieth century Chile. The system of rural servitude, known as ‘inquilinaje’, was for centuries the model of domination, subordination and integration which underlay the hierarchies of class, gender, ethnicity and race, as well as the morality of the whole society. Between 1967 and 1973 the hacienda system that had existed in...

The outcome of the 2015 general elections in Argentina held on 25th October will decide the composition of the legislative bodies and the new president if no run-off round is necessary. With the current president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, constitutionally barred from running again, and the results of the primaries in August, the scenario is still disputed between the main political coalitio...

The Canadian general election scheduled for Monday 19 October is widely regarded as too close to call. During a very long campaign the three main parties have been neck and neck in the opinion polls and it seems unlikely that any one of them will be able to achieve an overall majority in the House of Commons.

Newfoundland is often overlooked in studies of international and imperial relations in the early 20th century, or treated as a marginal player. During the premiership of Sir Robert Bond (1900-1909), however, the colony raised some important issues of principle concerning the treaty rights of French and United States fishermen in Newfoundland waters, and the relationship between a colony with respo...

The presentation will provide recent empirical evidence on inequality in the US, Canada and Latin America (Gini coefficients, top 1 percent shares, top 10 percent) and discuss trends and evolution comparing the Americas with Europe, OECD and main emerging markets. The presentation will highlight the role of taxation systems, wage formation, globalization, wealth concentration and other factors inc...

This book -part of the Cambridge series New Approaches to the Americas- summarizes a rich and growing social, political and cultural history of Latin American medicine produced in the past few decades. Three principal propositions animate this book. The first is that medicine and health are at the core of the history of Latin America, from the demographic disaster wrought since the 16th century by...