GWENDOLYN MIDLO HALL
June 2007
1300 Dante Street
New Orleans, LA 70118
(504)-861-2800 or (601-544-5862
Cell phone: (504)-710-3757
email: ghall1929@aol.com
WEB site: http://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/

 

TEACHING AND RESEARCH AFFILIATIONS

2007. Senior Research Fellow, Tulane University.

International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman Resource Institute on the African Diaspora, York University, Toronto, Canada.

Professor Emerita of History, Rutgers University. Taught Latin American and Caribbean history between 1971 and 1996.

 

EDUCATION

Ph. D., Latin American History, University of Michigan, 1970; M.A., Latin American History, University of the Americas, 1963; B.A., history, University of the Americas, 1962.

 

AWARDS AND PRIZES

2006. National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. "We the People" for "Comparing Race, Ethnicity, Slavery and Freedom in French, Spanish, and Early American Louisiana" Book in progress.

2004. Distinguished Service Award, Organization of American Historians.

2004. International Advisory Board Award, Harriet Tubman Resource Center on the African Diaspora, York University, Toronto, Canada.

2001. Award of Merit, American Association for State and Local History.

2001. Included in 2,000 Outstanding Scholars of the 20th Century (Cambridge, England).

1997. Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters awarded by the Ministry of Culture of France.(Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Ministre de la Culture de France.)

1997-1999. Served on prize committee for the Wesley Logan book prize in African Diaspora History, awarded jointly by the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History.

1991-1996. Principal Investigator, "Africans in Spanish and Early American Louisiana," Collaborative Research Project, Division of Research Programs, National Endowment for the Humanities, with Patrick Manning as co-investigator.

1997. George W. Lucas Community Service Award, New Orleans Chapter, NAACP.

1997. Elected Elder of the African Heritage Studies Society.

1997: One of the approximately 50 living women historians to be included in the bio-bibliographical reference work, American women historians, 1700s-1990s : a biographical dictionary / Jennifer Scanlon and Sharon Cosner, ed., American Women Historians from 1700 to the Present, (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997).

1996. John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.

1994. Humanist of the Year, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

1993. Hope Franklin Prize awarded by the American Studies Association

1993. Willie Lee Rose Prize of the Southern Association for Women Historians

1993. Elliott Rudwick Award of the Organization of American Historians

1993. Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award in American Immigration History by the Immigration History Society.

1993. The Erminie Wheeler Voegelin Prize, the American Society for Ethnohistory, for the Best Book in Ethnohistory (honorable mention).

1993. American Association for State and Local History. Certificate of Commendation.

1993. Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States.

1993. Outstanding Academic Book of 1993, Choice Magazine.

 

PUBLISHED BOOKS

Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Editor, Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (colored): The New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson During World War II (Champaign/Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1995) Paperback edition 2000.

Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: L.S.U Press, 1992, paperback edition, 1995). This book received nine prizes. See below for some evaluations by the prize committees.

Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: a Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971). Paperback edition, (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1996.

 

RECENT ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

Interview with Charles Henry Rowell, published in Callaloo 29.4 (2007) 1049-1055.

"The Franco-African Peoples of Haiti and Louisiana:ÊLanguage, Religion, Culture, Revolution." In Cécile Accilien, editor, Revolutionary Freedoms: A History Of Survival, Strength, And Imagination In Haiti. Caribbean Studies Press, 2006, 41-48.

"Slave Law," in Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History.ÊColin Palmer,ÊEd.Ê2ndÊed.ÊDetroit:ÊMacmillan Reference USA,Ê2006.Ê2746Êpp.Ê6Êvols.

"Cruzando o Atlântico: etnias africanas nas Américas", in: Topoi, v. 6, n. 10, jan.-jun. 2005, pp. 29-70

"Historical Memory, Consciousness and Conscience in the New Millennium." Plenary address at symposium about the 300th anniversary of the first French colonization of Louisiana. In Bradley Bond, ed., Greater French Colonial Louisiana: Atlantic World Perspetives. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005, 291-309.

"The Meanings of Mina," in Paul Lovejoy and David Trotman, editors, Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2003), 65-81.

"In search of the Invisible Senegambians : the Louisiana Slave Database (1723-1820)," in Saint-Louis et l'Esclavage, Actes du symposium international sur la traite négrière à Saint-Louis du Sénégal et dans son arrière-pays, Saint-Louis, 18, 19 et 20 décembre 1998, Djibril Samb Editor, IFAN (Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noir, Dakar, Senegal) , Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Initiations et Etudes Africaines N° 39, February, 2001, 237-64.

"Esclaves martiniquais en Louisiane coloniale,": in proceedings of conference organized by the Departmental Archives of Martinique in December, 1998, Les abolitions dans les Amérique (Martinique: Société des Amis des Archives de la Martinique, 2001).

"Myths About Creole Culture in Louisiana: Slaves, Africans, Blacks, Mixed Bloods, and Caribbeans," (Cultural Vistas, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 78-89, summer, 2001).

"African Women in French and Spanish Louisiana," in Catherine Clinton and Michelle Gillespie, The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, Oxford University Press, 1997.

"Relations raciales en Louisiane coloniale. Politique estatique et attitudes populaires," in Alain Saussel et Joseph Zitomersky, Colonies, territoires, societes. L'enjeu francais, (Paris: l'Harmattan, 1996).

"The Formation of Afro-Creole Culture," in Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992, 58-90.

"El Diablo en el Caribe: los dos primeros siglos de colonizacion," in Del Caribe, Vol. 14, (1989), pp. 58-70. This is a publication of the Casa del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba.

"Raza y libertad: La manumisión de los esclavos rurales de la Luisiana bajo la jurisdicción del capitan general de Cuba" Anuario de estudios americanos, Vol. XLIII, Seville, 1986, pp. 365-376.

 

PUBLISHED DATABASE COMPACT DISK

Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, March, 2000). ÊFor an example of extensive media coverage, see a front page story about this work in the New York Times, Sunday, July 30, 2000. Click on http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/073000la-slaves.html.

 

WEBSITES WITH SEARCH ENGINES

November 2, 2001. Published On Ibiblio.Org Website Along With A User Friendly Search Engine.

2003. Published with search engine on http://www.ancestry.com .

 

DATABASE PROJECT IN PROGRESS

Expansion of my Louisiana databases to include documents throughout the Americas rich in descriptions of African ethnicities and to cover all times and places throughout the USA where there are documents describing slaves.

 

BOOKS IN PROGRESS

Memoirs, untitled

"Diversity, Race Mixture, Slavery, and Freedom: Louisiana 1699-1820."

 

FILMS AND HISTORICAL DRAMA

A musical stage play was produced on December 14, 2001 in New Orleans sponsored by the Africana and Diversity Studies Program of the New Orleans Public Schools. It was based on my musical screen play, "La Cipriere," about runaway slave communities in the cypress swamps surrounding New Orleans published in Chicory, a magazine devoted to Afro-Louisiana culture I, 1, (Fall, 1988).

 

SOME TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY APPEARANCES

2003. Louisiana Public Broadcasting Series celebrating the Bi-Centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, broadcast over National Public Television.

PBS SERIES, LIFE360, a one hour broadcast ROOTS, November 2, 2001.

BBC WORLD NEWS TV DOMESTIC SERVICE AND BBC World News radio.

2000. LIFETIME LIVE, LIFETIME TV CHANNEL INTERVIEW.

For other media coverage, do a search for Gwendolyn Midlo Hall on Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, or any other WEB Search engine.

 

COMMENTS FROM PRIZE COMMITTEES, AFRICANS IN COLONIAL LOUISIANA

1) The John Hope Franklin Prize awarded by the American Studies Association:

"In making its selection of Africans in Colonial Louisiana, the committee cited the book's wide range of original research and its certain impact on many fields of American culture. Providing a solid ground for theory in extensive and difficult archival documentation, the book combines work in African American history, diaspora and Caribbean culture, anthropology, linguistics, and colonial American history. It opens to view a new transnational conception of the American culture that grew from slavery and from slave resistance, and describes a process of creolization whose full effects have perhaps only become apparent, at least to scholars, in the present day. More than any of the more than one hundred books submitted to the committee by publishers throughout the country, Africans in Colonial Louisiana promises to shape the course of future research in American studies for many years to come."

2) For the Willie Lee Rose Prize of the Southern Association for Women Historians:

"Hall's complex rendering of the mix of cultures in colonial Louisiana is rich, impressive, compelling. Her fine narrative style and penetrating analysis highlights ethnic diversity within a developing culture. Hall draws on an impressive array of sources, in French and Spanish as well as English. She traces the transformation of Africans from their home in Senegambia into Afro-Creoles in Louisiana. She demonstrates the dynamic of Africanizations within Louisiana culture and emerges with a perspective on the past wholly fresh and convincing. Hall provides us with a model study of the way in which a particular people's culture anchored in a specific time and place can testify to the diversity of American experience. Her thorough and engaging work makes a unique contribution to the history of African Americans, the colonial South and the distinctive culture known as Afro-Creole."

3) The Erniminie Wheeler Voegelin Prize, the American Society for Ethnohistory, for the Best Book in Ethnohistory (honorable mention):

"Using Documentation in Spanish and French, Gwendolyn Hall writes the history of African slaves in colonial Louisiana, employing Eric Wolf's definition of culture as `a series of processes that construct, reconstruct, and dismantle culture materials in response to identifiable determinants. Arguing against treating slave culture in isolation, Hall demonstrates that slaves forged a new culture in America through intense contacts with people of other backgrounds. Hall gives us a remarkably encompassing study of both the African and the Louisiana dimensions of her subject. Her research has crossed both national and disciplinary borders to integrate fresh and compelling information into a presentation that is closely analytical, absorbing, and revealing."

 

SOME RECENT LECTURES

March, 2006. Lecture at Florida International University, Miami. Ethnicities in the African Diaspora in the Americas.

July, 2005. Lecture about teaching grade school children about Louisiana history. ESSENCE conference, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

July, 2005. Presentation about African ethnicity databases. Harriet Tubman Center for the Study of the African Diaspora, York University, Toronto, Canada.

June, 2005. Second Congo Square Synposium and Festival. Southern University of New Orleans, Congo Square, and the International Arts Festival at City Park.

April, 2005. Martinique. Lectures in French about slaves in the United States around the time of emancipation.

April, 2005. Cleveland State University. Public lectures and demonstration of my database website.

March, 2005. Lecture in Spanish at Antigua, Guatemala.

July, 2004. Lecture in Spanish, Office of the Historian of the City, Santiago de Cuba.

June, 2004. Lecture at Southern University of New Orleans, First Congo Square Symposium.

February, 2004. Lecture in Spanish at the University of Costa Rica.

November, 2003. Lecture to Louisiana Bicentennial of Louisiana Purchase Festival, LSU-Baton Rouge.

October, 2003. Lecture at the David Driskoll Symposium Series and at the Center for Computer Applications to the Humanities, University of Maryland, College Park.

March, 2003. New Orleans, Xavier University, "Slavery and After in New Orleans."

February, 2003. Lewiston, Maine, Bates College, several lectures.

January, 2003. Washington, DC, conference of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

November, 2002. New Orleans, at preview of HBO film based upon slave narratives; New Orleans, to middle school public school teachers demonstrating my databases.

July 2, 2002. "Mining Notarial Documents," Database Workshop, Harriet Tubman Center, York University, Toronto, Canada.

June 21-22, 2002. Minneapolis, Minnesota, "Linking Africa with the Americas through Databases Created From Original Manuscript Sources," African Genealogy & Genetics: Looking Back to Move Forward, Center for Bioethics, School of Medicine, University of Minnesota, Proceedings to be published on their website and in Cambridge Quarterly.

February 2, 2002, Lecture and demonstration of my database website sponsored by Middlesex County New Jersey Culture and Heritage Commission broadcast to advanced placement history high school classes over public access TV.

October, 2001. Hattiesburg, MS., University of Southern Mississippi. Slaves in the Mississippi Valley: Making the Invisible Visible. Sponsored by the Graduate Programs in Latin American and in African History.

February/March/April 2001. National Council for the Humanities, Washington, D.C.; Director's Lecture Series, National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC,; Harvard University Workshop on Gender in the Atlantic World; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Provost's Distinguished Lecture Series,; Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan; Black Women's History Conference, Plainfield, New Jersey: Ethnic Studies Organization Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana; New Orleans, Dillard Universit; Provost's Distinguished Lecturer.

October and November, 2000. University of Delaware; University of Houston; Connecticut Historical Society; Fairfield University, Connecticut; Cane River Historic Site, Natchitoches, Louisiana; African-American Museum, Donaldsonville, Louisiana.

August 19-21, 2000. UNESCO Routes to Slavery Project Education Conference. Tulane University, New Orleans. Demonstrated my Louisiana Slave Database and discussed its applications to education.

April 5, 2000. Discussed and demonstrated my Louisiana Slave Databases at McNeese State University Banner Lecture Series, Lake Charles, Louisiana.

October 18, 1999. Demonstrated my Louisiana Slave Database and discussed my essay, "Africans after the Atlantic Slave Trade: Randomized, Fractionalized or Clustered?" at the Harriet Tubman seminar, York University, Toronto.

October 5, 1999. "Africans in the Americas: How to Find Them." Unesco Routes to Slavery Conference held at New York University and the Schomberg Library.

Updated: June 2007