Discussion | Modern Spain and the Early Travels of Arturo Schomburg

Dr. Vanessa Valdés (The City College of New York), co-curator of the exhibition Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explores 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 17th-century Spain with 20th-century New York.

About the Speakers
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. 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 (2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (2018) and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (2021) with Chad Leahy. Jones also co-edits The Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham.

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 latest 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.

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.