O'Connell Initiative Events

O'Connell Events 2023

Slavery's Capitalism and the Para-Archive in Nineteenth Century Salvador da Bahia
Mary Hicks, University of Chicago

Friday, March 24 | 1:00pm
Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus
Gabelli School of Business
140 West, Classroom 334

Dr. Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.

On Our Own Terms: Alternatives to Capitalist Modernization in Cold War Guatamala
Sarah Foss, Oklahoma State University

Wednesday March 1 | 11:30am
Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus
Gabelli School of Business
140 West, Classroom 334

Dr. Sarah Foss is an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma State University. Her work focuses on the politics of Cold War era international development projects in Latin America and the ways that Indigenous people interacted with, and often appropriated, these projects. Contrary to American project planners' expectations about modernization and development, indigenous beneficiaries were not passive recipients but actively engaged with development interventions and, in the process, redefined racialized ideas about Indigeneity.