Unless otherwise specified, all events will take place in the Kyle Morrow Room on the third floor of Fondren Library at Rice University. Attendees without Rice IDs must enter the building through its main entrance on the northeast side of the building. Information for presenters about the Kyle Morrow Room’s technology options, can be found here.
February 23rd, 2018
Welcome and Introductory Remarks, 1:00-1:15 p.m.
Panel 1: 1:15-3:15 p.m.
Controlling the Enslaved Body: Power and the Practice of Medicine
Chair: Vicki M. Heath, Texas A&M University
“Unbelievable Suffering: Gender, Slavery, and Malingering in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World”
Elise Mitchell, New York University
“‘Me Navel-String Bury Deh!’: Infant Death and Survival in the Black Atlantic”
Wangui Muigai, Brandeis University
“Examining Lunacy and Slavery through Haptic Studies”
Deirdre Cooper Owens, Queens College-CUNY
“A Case Study in Charleston: Slave Hospitals of the Early National Period”
Rana Hogarth, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Comments by Michael Thompson, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
Panel 2: 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Constructing Racial Difference in Images, Classes, and Courts
Chair: Kimberly V. Jones, Rice University
“Habeas Corpus: Fugitivity and Physiognomy in the Case of John Bolding”
Meagan Wierda, Rutgers University
“The Visual Display of Black Medical Subjects from Slavery to Segregation”
Stephen C. Kenny, University of Liverpool
“The burial of a black mummy in the age of Abolition and Emancipation – Brazil (1900-1929)”
Lívia Maria Tiede, Universidade Estadual De Campinas
Comments by Cameron Strang, University of Nevada, Reno
Keynote Address, 5:30-7:00 p.m.
“Medicine, Slavery, and the Invention of the Quantifiable Body”
Pablo Gomez, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Dinner and Reception, 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Dean’s Foyer and Courtyard, First Floor, Humanities Building
February 24, 2018
Breakfast, 8:00-9:00 a.m.
Dean’s Foyer and Courtyard, First Floor, Humanities Building
Panel 3: 9:15-10:45 a.m.
Africa, the Slave Trade, and Atlantic Medicine
Chair: D. Andrew Johnson, Rice University
“Healers in Bondage: Enslaved Medical Practice in the West African Slave Trading Zones”
Carolyn Roberts, Yale University
“Medicine and Slavery in the Lusophone Atlantic World: Evolving Healing Practices of Portuguese Surgeons and Physicians in Eighteenth-Century Brazil and Angola”
Timothy D. Walker, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
“Transatlantic Healers: African Ritual and Therapeutic Practice in the Bahian Slave Trade, 1720-1835”
Mary Hicks, Amherst College
Comments by Alida C. Metcalf, Rice University
Panel 4: 11:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
Healing, Health, and Conjure on Atlantic Plantations
Chair: K. James Myers, Rice University
“Stigmatized Diseases, Therapeutic Communities, and Ritual Leadership in the Early Caribbean”
Kristen Block, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
“From Cemis and Zonbi to Mama Juana: Indigenous Traces in Popular Sorcery in Hispaniola”
Robin Lauren Derby, University of California, Los Angeles
“Poisoned Relations: Medical Choices and Poison Accusations within Enslaved Communities”
Chelsea Berry, Georgetown University
“Aunt Jane’s Hymns: Healing the Trauma of the ‘Second Middle Passage’”
William D. Jones, Rice University
Comments by Rosanne Adderley, Tulane University
Lunch, 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Panel 5: 2:30-4:00 p.m.
Medical Professionalization in the Era of Emancipation
Chair: W. E. Skidmore, Rice University
“Before John Snow: Slavery, Science, and the Development of Epidemiological Methods in West Africa, 1844-1852”
Jim Downs, Connecticut College
“Black Bodies, Medical Science, and the Age of Emancipation”
Leslie Schwalm, University of Iowa
“Neurology in the U.S. South and Brazil, 1850-1880”
Wendy Gonaver, University of California, San Diego
Comments by Urmi Engineer Willoughby, Murray State University
Panel 6: 4:15-5:30 p.m.
The Medical Legacies of Slavery
Chair: Élodie Grossi, Tulane University
“Brazil’s Era of Epidemics (1850-1910): How Disease Transformed a Nation and Slave Society”
Ian Read, Soka University
“‘Pages of Hysteria:’ Medicalized Sexual Violence in New World Economies and Gayl Jones’ Corregidora”
Tala Khanmalek, Princeton University
Comments by Richard M. Mizelle, Jr, University of Houston
Keynote Address, 6:00-7:30 p.m.
Herring Hall 100
“Black Women’s Politics of Healing in the Wake”
Sharla Fett, Occidental College
Dinner and Reception, 7:30-9:00 p.m.
Dean’s Foyer and Courtyard, First Floor, Humanities Building
This conference has been made possible thanks to the generosity of the Rice University Humanities Research Center and Department of History.