Bios

MARIA ALESSANDRA BOLLETTINO
Maria Alessandra Bollettino is associate professor of history at Framingham State University in Framingham, Massachusetts. Her book manuscript, “Slavery, War, and Britain’s Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Empire” examines the participation of enslaved and free blacks in the imperial wars Britain waged against France and Spain over the course of the eighteenth century and the ways in which blacks’ wartime actions influenced British conceptions of race, slavery, and imperial identity. Her article, “‘Of equal or of more Service’: Black Soldiers and the British Empire in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Caribbean” is forthcoming in the journal Slavery & Abolition. She has presented her work in several academic forums, among them Harvard University’s International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World and conferences sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

PAUL CHOPELIN
An assistant professor in modern history at Lyon3 Jean Moulin university, Paul Chopelin is a member of the Rhône-Alpes historical research laboratory (UMR 5190). He is the author of a thesis on religious conflicts in the Lyon urban area during the Revolution and his work focuses on the relationship between politics and religion in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe. He has written a biography of Abbé Grégoire (L’obscurantisme et les Lumières, 2013, in collaboration with Caroline Chopelin) and recently directed a collective work on the memory of public executed princes in modern and contemporary Europe (Le sang des princes, 2014, in collaboration with Sylvène Edouard). He is at present, investigating the networks of catholic counter-revolution and their contemporary legacies, in order to understand how religious resistance to the Enlightenment ideas was set up in Europe from the 1750s to the 1830s and how those fights today still feed an integralist political culture based on the primacy of religious matters.

RUMA CHOPRA
Ruma Chopra is Professor of History at San Jose State University. She is the author of Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City During the Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2011) and Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). Her current book project, under contract with Yale University Press, examines the resilience of deported ex-slaves (maroons) in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

GABRIEL DI MEGLIO
Gabriel Di Meglio received his PhD in history from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He is a researcher at the Argentine CONICET [National Commission of research in science and technique] and he teaches Argentine history of 18^th and 19^th centuries at the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

His main interests are popular politics in 19th century Buenos Aires and the Rio de la Plata, on which he has published articles in different countries, and in Argentina the books ¡Viva el bajo pueblo! La plebe urbana de Buenos Aires y la política entre la Revolución de Mayo y el rosismo (2006), ¡Mueran los salvajes unitarios! La Mazorca y la política en tiempos de Rosas (2007), Historia de las clases populares en la Argentina desde 1516 hasta 1880 (2012), Manuel Dorrego. Vida y muerte de un líder popular (2014), 1816. La trama de la independencia (2016), and edited with Raúl Fradkin Hacer política. La participación popular en el siglo XIX rioplatense (2013).

He has also been part of a team of Iberian-American conceptual history from 1750 to 1850, focusing on “Patria” and “Republic”. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in 2011 at the University of California, Berkeley, and is part of the international project “War and Nation in South America”, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Now he is working on different aspects of the war between Argentina and Brazil of 1825-1828. He works in public history as well, writing and conducting TV shows about history in Canal Encuentro -of the Argentinean Ministry of Education- from time to time. Since 2015 he is the director of a museum, the Museo Nacional del Cabildo de Buenos Aires y la Revolución de Mayo.

ALEXANDRE DUPONT
Alexandre Dupont is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris and a former member of the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid. I did my PhD in Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (thesis supervisor: Philippe Boutry) and in the Universidad de Zaragoza (thesis supervisor: Pedro Rújula) and defended it in 2015. My PhD was about the counter-revolutionary internationalism between France and Spain in the 1870’s. More precisely, I studied how some French legitimists and French inhabitants of the Pyrenees helped the Spanish carlists in their attempt to get back to power in Spain during the Second Carlist War (1872-1876). I am now ATER (which would be like assistant lecturer) in the IEP of Aix-en-Provence.

DORIS GARRAWAY
Doris L. Garraway’s research and teaching interests include Francophone Caribbean literature and historiography from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, the Haitian Revolution, early modern French cultures, postcolonial studies, law, and performance. She is the author of The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Duke UP, 2005; reprint 2008), and editor of Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (University of Virginia Press, 2008). She has also published numerous articles in leading journals on a range of Francophone Caribbean authors from the colonial and postcolonial periods. Her most recent publications draw from her ongoing research on early postrevolutionary Haiti and the Kingdom of Henry Christophe: “Empire of Liberty, Kingdom of Civilization: Henry Christophe, Baron de Vastey, and the Paradoxes of Universalism in Postrevolutionary Haiti” in Small Axe 16.3 (2012): 1-21; “Abolition, Sentiment, and the Problem of Agency in the Système colonial dévoilé by Baron de Vastey,” in The Colonial System Unveiled, edited by Chris Bongie (Liverpool UP, 2014); and “Print, Publics, and the Scene of Universal Equality in the Kingdom of Henry Christophe,” in L’Esprit créateur 56.1 (Spring 2016) 82-100. Recently, Garraway has held fellowships from Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies and Northwestern’s Kaplan Center for the Humanities. Her current book project, from which her talk will draw, is tentatively entitled “Liberty’s Majesty: Sovereignty, Print, and Performance in Postrevolutionary Haiti.

CLAUDIA GUARISCO
Claudia Guarisco is Doctor in History from El Colegio de México (2000) and currently works in the Center for Historical Studies at El Colegio Mexiquense. Among her last publications is the book: La reconstitución del espacio político indígena. Lima y el valle de México durante la crisis de la Monarquía española (The Reconstitution of Indigenous Political Space. Lima and the Valley of México during the Crisis of the Spanish Monarchy). Colecció Amèrica, 28. Universitat Jaume i, Castelló de la Plana, Valencia (2012). More recently, she has edited the personal journal of a Spanish soldier who witnessed the consumation of Mexico’s Independence. This book is in process of publication by Casa de Velázquez, in Madrid, under the title: Apuntaciones que en sus viages a Ultramar ha tomado el oficial de infantería Modesto de la Torre, 1821-1822 (The Apuntaciones of Royalist Lieutenant Modesto de la Torre during his Travels in Spanish America,1821-1822).

MAYA JASANOFF
Maya Jasanoff is Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard, specializing in the history of the British Empire. She is currently completing a book on the life and times of Joseph Conrad as the first author of globalization. Her first book, Edge of Empire, describes British expansion in India and Egypt through the lives of art collectors, and was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize. Her 2011 book Liberty’s Exiles offers the first global history of loyalists who fled revolutionary America and resettled in Canada, the Caribbean, Britain, Sierra Leone, and beyond. It received numerous honors including the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-Fiction and the George Washington Book Prize. Jasanoff is a frequent contributor to American and British newspapers and magazines. A 2013 John Simon Guggenheim fellow, she was named Harvard College Professor in 2015 for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

HENDRIK KRAAY
Hendrik Kraay is professor of history at the University of Calgary. He received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 and subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia. In 2004, he was visiting professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of Race, State, and Armed Forces in Independence-Era Brazil: Bahia, 1790s-1840s (Stanford University Press, 2001), the latter translated into Portuguese as Política racial, Estado e forças armadas na época da Independência: Bahia, 1790-1850 (Hucitec, 2011), and Days of National Festivity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1823-1889 (Stanford University Press, 2013). He has edited or coedited four books and is currently writing a book that traces the history of the Dois de Julho (2 July) festival in Bahia, Brazil. He is also researching the pre-Lenten celebrations of entrudo in early-nineteenth-century Brazil. His research has been supported by two Standard Research Grants and one Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

AURÉLIEN LIGNEREUX
Aurélien Lignereux is a lecturer in History at the Institut of Political Studies  of Grenoble. Starting from an institutional focus of napoleonic police powers, his scientific journey brought him to pursue the social and political history of police forces with a Phd thesis  on the rebellions against the gendarmes - these soldiers who are responsible for rural policing in France - during the first half of 19th century. Then, this research path leads to a jointly social and cultural history of the Napoleonic Empire through the study of its expatriate officials coming to francized Europe. Each time, whether with the gendarmes or the Napoleonic stabilization, he was faced with the problems of the endemic chouannerie and the shadow of Military Vendée. His latest book was about the royalist uprising in the western départements during the Hundred Days.

ANDREA LISLY
Andrea Lisly Gonçalves is an Associate Professor of History of Brazil at the Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil, where she has taught since 1984. The theme of slavery is her area of expertise and it is also the focus of her research projects along the years. She has published in numerous journals and is the author of book chapters on that theme.  Her current research focuses on foreign political prisoners during the reign of D. Miguel (1828-1834). She is the author of the book The Margins of Freedom: Manumission Practice in Minas Gerais, among other works.

STEINAR SAETHER
Steinar Saether is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Oslo. He holds a master’s degree in History from the University of Oslo and a Ph.D. from the University of Warwick (UK). His main publications in Spanish and English include articles on racial and ethnic identities in late colonial and early republican Spanish America. He has been especially interested in how to explain popular support for the royalist cause in the province of Santa Marta, in present-day Colombia, during the Wars of Independence. The last five years his research has mainly focused on Scandinavian migration to and within Latin America between 1820 and 1940.

SIMON SARLIN
Simon Sarlin is an Associate Professor at the Department of History, University of Paris-Nanterre (France), with a specialization in 19th European comparative history. His Ph.D., completed in 2010, dealt with the international mobilization against the Italian Risorgimento after 1860. His research interests include Counter-Revolution, political and religious activism, religion, politics and violence in Mediterranean Europe.

ELENA SCHNEIDER
Elena Schneider is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.  Her work explores the history of race, slavery, and empire in Latin America and the Atlantic world.  Her book manuscript, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World is currently under revision for publication.  The book focuses on the role of slavery, the slave trade, and soldiers of African descent during the British invasion and occupation of Havana at the end of the Seven Years’ War and subsequent reform throughout the Spanish Atlantic world.  Previously, she was an NEH postdoctoral fellow of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and visiting assistant professor of history at the College of William & Mary.  A graduate of Princeton University’s department of history, she has received fellowships from the John Carter Brown Library, the McNeill Center for Early American Studies, the Program in Early American Society and Economy, the William L. Clements Library, and the Huntington Library. 

SERGIO SERULNIKOV
Sergio Serulnikov is Professor of History at the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires and researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas de la Argentina. He was Assistant and Associate Professor at Boston College (1999-2008). He is author of Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Duke University Press, 2003); Conflictos sociales e insurgencia en el mundo colonial andino. El norte de Potosí, siglo XVIII (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006); Revolución en los Andes. La era de Túpac Amaru (Editorial Sudamericana, 2010); and Revolution in the Andes. The Era of Túpac Amaru (Duke University Press, 2013). His current research focuses on the changes in the urban political culture of late colonial Charcas. Some of his publications on this subject include, “‘Las proezas de la Ciudad y su Ilustre Ayuntamiento’: Simbolismo político y política urbana en Charcas a fines del siglo XVIII” (Latin American Research Review, 2008); “Patricians and Plebeians in Late Colonial Charcas: Identity, Representation, and Colonialism”, in A. B. Fisher and M. D. O’Hara (Eds.), Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (Duke University Press, 2009); “El fin del orden colonial en perspectiva histórica. Las prácticas políticas en la ciudad de La Plata, 1781-1785 y 1809” (Revista Andina, 2012); and “La lógica del absolutismo. Vecinos y magistrados en Charcas en tiempos del reformismo borbónico” (Colonial Latin American Review, forthcoming).

RANDY SPARKS
Randy Sparks is Professor of History at Tulane University. He is the author of several books including, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (2008), Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (2014); and Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives Across the Atlantic World (2016), all with Harvard Univ. Press. This paper is part of his current project, a book-length study of consular manumissions around the Atlantic World.

TOMÁS STRAKA
Tomás Straka is a member of the National Academy of History of Venezuela.  Researcher of the Catholic University Andrés Bello of Caracas, where directs the Masters of History, he is columnist in webs such as Nueva Sociedad and Prodavinci.com.  He is the author of La voz de los vencidos, ideas del partido realista de Caracas (1810-1821); La épica del desencanto. Historiografía, política y bolivarianismo en Venezuela; and La república fragmentada.  Claves para entender a Venezuela.