EMRG Works-in-Progress Sessions: Summer Mentorship Research Projects

-presented by Elizabeth M. Landers (UCLA)
Hosted by the Early Modern Research Group

Online event via Zoom
For Zoom registration details, please email the Early Modern Research Group.

The Graduate Certificate in Early Modern Studies, administered by the Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies, offers UCLA graduate students an avenue to explore the increasingly transnational and interdisciplinary nature of early modern studies through specially designated comparative courses and unique fellowship and mentoring opportunities.

Students in the certificate program are eligible to apply for competitive Summer Mentorships, which provide financial support to complete one of the certificate requirements: a 25-page paper on an early modern studies topic of interdisciplinary breadth. The Summer Mentorship affords the opportunity for students to work closely with a Center/Clark Core Faculty member to develop their paper for presentation at an academic conference or for potential publication.

The Early Modern Research Group, which meets under the auspices of the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, invites you to attend this work-in-progress session featuring presentations by two Summer Mentorship awardees. Following each presentation, the speakers and their faculty mentors welcome feedback from attendees during a collaborative discussion.

Elizabeth M. Landers will present “Negotiating Tenuous Emancipation and Everyday Life: Rural Black Communities in 1799 St. Domingue.” She is mentored by Carla Gardina Pestana, Department Chair & Joyce Appelby Endowed Chair of America in the World, Department of History.

This presentation examines the lives of St. Domingue’s rural black inhabitants as they navigated the fragile frontier between enslavement and tenuous emancipation in 1799. This study reconsiders how colonial sources can inform archival silences by tracing material practices and rural black lifeways in the cotton-producing Artibonite region. It follows men, women, and children as they negotiated everyday life and claimed social spaces and autonomy. Their actions demonstrate not only resistance to domestic and labor regimes; but also, the means by which they claimed self-sufficiency and negotiated their own lifeways. This focus on rural black communities offers an alternative perspective to the more familiar political narratives of the Haitian Revolution and the plantation regime.

Elizabeth is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research centers on the analysis of everyday life and the material realities that sustained marginalized communities throughout the broader Atlantic Caribbean during the early modern period. Elizabeth’s Master’s work in Latin American Studies explored the transfer of people, practices, and knowledge from St. Domingue to Eastern Cuba during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Elizabeth holds B.A.s from UCLA in History and French, M.A.s from Loyola University Chicago and UCLA, and has studied at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Prior to her graduate studies at UCLA, Elizabeth worked in the private sector in the U.S., Europe, Asia, N. Africa, and Latin America; and served in public administration in Haiti.