Two New Research Fellows at IBAR
We welcome our new Research Fellows, Dr Astrid Haas and Dr Nicole Willson, who have both taken up appointments at IBAR in September 2019.
Astrid is working on her advanced career project: “Black Inter-American Mobilities and Autobiography in the Age of Revolutions (1760-1860).” Her research is funded by a two-year Marie Curie Intra-Eurpean fellowship of the European Union (grant agreement no. 834975). The project explores the ways transnational autobiographies by black authors address different forms of black mobility in the Americas during the Age of Revolutions and its aftermath. In her research, Astrid charts black contributions to the genre of autobiography from the period that connects Inter-American and Transatlantic Studies. During her fellowship, Astrid will convene an international conference on “Black Mobilities in the Americas” in 2021. Moreover, she will present the results of her work in a series of articles and prepare the first comprehensive study on black mobilities across the Americas during the Age of Revolution and their representation in black-authored atuobiography.
Nicole is working on a three-year Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship entitled “Fanm Rebèl: Recovering the Histories of Haiti’s Women Revolutionaries.” The project represents the most comprehensive, critical, creative and interdisciplinary study of women in the Haitian Revolution to date. It shows how women before, during and after the revolutionary moment articulated narratives of resistance through spiritual practice, domestic labour, creativity, survival, subterfuge and armed combat. It further demonstrates how the symbolic and imaginative legacy of these acts of female-led resistance have been preserved in artistic practices, oral histories, community customs and activist networks in Haiti and across the Haitian diaspora in the present. As part of this project, Nicole will produce the first monograph-length study on women in the Haitian Revolution and will host an international conference entitled “Istwa Fanm: Haitian Women’s (Hi)Stories Past, Present, Future” in 2022.
