Distinguished Scholars Series
2024-2025
Regional Origins and Intra-African Patterns of Gene Flow during the Millennia of Enslavement
November 20, 2024 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
This lecture event will highlight developing models that reflect the diverse origins of African-descended peoples of the African Diasporas is an important task which provides insights of potential evolutionary relevance and possible biomedical significance (via geospatially mediated precision medicine). Computational approaches can be trained to accurately identify the African empires and kingdoms (AEKs) involved in the procurement, kidnapping, transport, and delivery of captive Africans for enslavement within and outside of Africa. Supervised and unsupervised machine learning GIS models can also identify the regional and ethnic sources of enslaved Africans and predict the routes used to take them from their homelands to export sites on the various coasts. By grounding our analysis in the paradigm of the 8th-20th c Millennia of Enslavement we consider each of the major intra-African slave trades and the resulting demic diffusion and its impact on gene flow patterns.
2018-2019
Women and the Laws: Reading Le Code Noir
February 28, 2019 @ 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Le Code Noir, the body of law advanced by the government of Louis XIV in the world of 17th-century France, is one of the first codified legal documents regarding judicial conduct toward enslaved persons in the French colonies of the New World. As slavery increasingly established an iron-clad relationship between skin color and the absence of human and civil rights, what implications did it have for other colonial powers operating in the Atlantic context? The terrors of Le Code Noir for the bonded female and her children were determined by the dictum “partus sequitur ventrem”, Latin for “that which is brought forth follows the womb”. The codification of hereditary racial slavery highlights the contradictions that throw into crisis our entire understanding today of the repertoire of intimacy and sentimentality.
Distinguished Speakers Series-Toyin Falola
February 11, 2019 @ 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Toyin Falola, Ph.D., is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. A recipient of ten honorary doctorates, an annual conference has been named after him: TOFAC (Toyin Falola Annual Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora). The Association of Third World Studies has named its annual best book after him as the Toyin Falola Prize for the best book on Africa. He has contributed to various academic associations, once serving as the President of the African Studies Association. He has a forthcoming book, In Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation.