Modern Spain and the Early Travels of Arturo Schomburg

In collaboration with Dr. Vanessa Valdés (City College of New York), co-curator of the exhibition J at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, join us as we explore the presence of the African diaspora in modern Spain and Arturo Schomburg’s travel to Seville in 1926 to focus on Spain and its empire in the trafficking of enslaved African people. She will be joined by Dr. Nicholas R. Jones (Yale), author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain and Dr. Eva María Copeland, Associate Professor of Spanish at Dickinson College.

Arturo Schomburg serves as a thread connecting seventeenth-century Spain with twentieth-century New York.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Eva María Copeland, PhD is Associate Professor of Spanish at Dickinson College. Her research focuses on questions of race, sexuality, gender, and national identity in the cultural production of 19th-21st century Spain with a postcolonial and transatlantic emphasis. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Hispanic Review, Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades/ Journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her latest article, “On Blackness and Belonging in Contemporary Spain: Desirée Bela-Lobedde’s Ser mujer negra en España” was recently published in the December 2022 issue of Hispania and was awarded the 2023 AATSP (American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese) Outstanding Scholarly Publication Award. She is currently working on a book project that explores Blackness, belonging, and identity in contemporary Afro-Spanish cultural texts.

Nicholas R. Jones, PhD is the former King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s Scholar-in-Residence at New York University (2021-2022). He is the author of the award-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge, January 2021) with Chad Leahy. Jones also co-edits The Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham. Jones’s research has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as has held visiting professorships at Georgetown University and New York University.

Vanessa K. Valdés, PhD is the Associate Provost for Community Engagement at The City College of New York. She is the former interim dean of Macaulay Honors College at CUNY (2021-2022) and the former director of the Black Studies Program (2019-2021). A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, her research interests focus on the cultural production of Black peoples throughout the Americas: the United States and Latin America, including Brazil, and the Caribbean. She is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She is the author of Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). Her recent book, Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020) is an edited collection that re-centers Haiti in the disciplines of Caribbean, and more broadly, Latin American Studies.

ASL interpretation will be provided upon availability of interpreters. Live captioning is available for streaming programs. Additional accessibility requests can be made by e-mail [email protected].

#SchomburgLive

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Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. "Columbus Park, Seville" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1926. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/db311200-eb48-013a-dbf7-0242ac110003

FIRST COME, FIRST SEATED Events are free and open to all, but due to space constraints registration is requested.  Registered guests are given priority check-in 15 to 30 minutes before start time. After the event starts all registered seats are released regardless of registration, so we recommend that you arrive early. 

GUESTS Please note that holding seats in the Langston Hughes Auditorium is strictly prohibited and there is no food or drinks allowed anywhere in the Schomburg Center.

E-TRANSPORTATION NYPL policy prohibits electric transportation devices (e.g., motorbikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, e-skateboards) from being brought into or stored at library sites for any length of time, as this is the best way to keep our spaces & people safe.

AUDIO/VIDEO RECORDING Programs are photographed and recorded by the Schomburg Center. Attending this event indicates your consent to being filmed/photographed and your consent to the use of your recorded image for any all purposes of the New York Public Library, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Cave Canem.

PRESS Please send all press inquiries (photo, video, interviews, audio-recording, etc) at least 24-hours before the day of the program to Leah Drayton at [email protected].

Please note that professional video recordings are prohibited without expressed consent.

IN-PERSON | By registering for this event, you are acknowledging that an inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in any public place where people are present. By attending an in-person program at The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, you voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold The New York Public Library, its Trustees, officers, agent and employees liable for any illness or injury. If you have symptoms consistent with COVID-19 or suspect you have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive, please stay home.

Event Venue

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Blvd, New York, United States