CONFERENCE, “ENSLAVED: PEOPLES OF THE HISTORIC SLAVE TRADE.”



Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade
Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan
RCAH Theatre (Snyder Hall, Terrace Level)
March 8-9, 2019


More than 50 scholars from around the globe will be in attendance when the Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade conference begins on March 8, 2019 at the RCAH Theater in Snyder-Phillips Hall at Michigan State University. A truly international event, the Enslaved conference brings together scholars based in the United States, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Benin, the Bahamas, and the Netherlands. The conference encourages collaboration among scholars utilizing databases to document and reconstruct the lives of individuals who were part of historic slave trades. This conference will focus primarily on the enslavement and trade of people of African descent before the twentieth century, but other presentations discuss enslaved indigenous peoples in the Americas. The conference has a broad geographic focus, including presentations on slavery in parts of the U.S., the Caribbean, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch parts of the Americas, several different regions of Africa, and Europe. The conference will take place from roughly 8:30-6:00 on both Friday, March 8, and Saturday March 9. A more detailed schedule can be found here.

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Enslaved project is building a digital hub for students, researchers, and the general public to search over numerous databases to reconstruct the lives of individuals who were part of the historic slave trade. Current digital projects fail to merge the data across the datasets, resulting in isolated projects and databases that do little to aid scholars in analyzing these sources. The Enslaved conference will provide opportunities for researchers across the globe to gain important knowledge about the construction of databases for public consumption, and encourages collaboration between scholars to best make public accurate and easily accessed information about slavery and the slave trade.
If you’d like to register, please email enslavedconference@gmail.com. There is no fee.

ECAS 2019. Africa: Connections and Disruptions - Photo archives: silence and blindness



Long abstract
We will explore parallels in the relationship between an external reality and both archives and photographs. Both have little natural connection and/or directly reflecting external reality. Both show traces of their becoming but must be read beyond the frame of their materiality and the connections between order and meaning must be disentangled in order to gain and reveal significance. However, the archival order always contains several voids - deliberate and unintended - that are due to the process of the archives' emergence in changing contexts. Thus, various types of silences and blindness constitute the archive order. How can these silences be broken or made to resonate? What happens when we are no longer able to grasp them with the simplifying gaze of habit? How can connections and disruptions that emerge from archives' silences and blindness be used fruitfully by scholars working with and in photo archives?
Trouillot talks of archival silence, the Comaroffs of reading across and Stoler along the archival grain. The visual parallel to silence is blindness. How can research on photo archives find a white stick or an archival equivalent to braille? Those with macular degeneration must use peripheral vision, peeking sideways. What sort of archival research might this inspire?
This panel will examine various possibilities of working with photo archives that do not see empty (negative) spaces as a deficit, but on the contrary as an opportunity for alternative viewings of the archive, drawing productive power precisely from the contents, no matter how perceived.

CURSO INTRODUÇÃO A PALEOGRAFIA



IGHB está com inscrições abertas para o curso Introdução a Paleografia, que será realizado de 8 a 10 de abril de 2019, das 14h às 18h. As aulas serão ministradas pelos professores Libania Silva e Savio Queiroz.

Em decorrência da crescente demanda de cursos que exigem a pesquisa e leitura de documentos manuscritos, o curso propõe uma franca e objetiva abordagem interdisciplinar prática e metodológica sobre a escrita e leitura de documentos produzidos entre os séculos XVI e XIX, com enfoque nas practices da ciência histórica.
Carga horária: 20 horas (com certificação)

Conteúdo:
Introdução: História, Conceitos e usos da paleografia e da diplomática;
Escritas Antigas: Especificidades, especialidades e escrita;
Tipologias caligráficas: A escrita na Península Ibérica
O trato com os documentos manuscritos;
Elementos Cruciais: Identificação de abreviaturas, termos, símbolos e sinais gráficos: coleções.
Suportes diversos: fotocópias, microfilmes, imagens digitalizadas;
A transcrição do manuscrito: teorias e métodos;
Exercício de transcrição de textos 1: peculiaridades da escrita à mão, dos
suportes, instrumentos e tintas;
Exercício de transcrição de textos 2: leitura, transcrição e formatação dos documentos;
Exercício de transcrição de textos 3: os tipos documentais;