Faculty

Jane Landers
Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History

PhD, University of Florida, 1988

History of colonial Latin America; the Atlantic World; the Circum-Caribbean borderlands;  comparative slave systems; women and gender in colonial Latin America

Telephone: 615-322-3403
Email: Jane.landers@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: Tuesdays 10:00 am - 12:00 noon, and by appointment
Office: 114 Benson Hall

Link to current cv.

Jane Landers is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, former Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Science and past Director of the Center for Latin American Studies. She is the author of Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass., 2010) which was awarded the Rembert Patrick Book Award and has been awarded honorary mention for the 2011 Bolton Johnson Prize for the best English-language book on any aspect of Latin American History. She has also authored Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005) which was awarded the Frances B. Simkins Prize for Distinguished First Book in Southern History and was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. She co-authored the college textbook, The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (Harlan Davidson, 2007) and is the editor of Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida (Gainesville, 2000, 2001) and Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas (London, 1996). She is co-editor of Slaves, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, 2006), and The African American Heritage of Florida (Gainesville, 1995) which won the Rembert Patrick Book Award and a commendation from the American Society for State and Local History. She has published essays in The American Historical Review, Slavery and Abolition, The New West Indian Guide, The Americas, Colonial Latin American Historical Review and a variety of anthologies and edited volumes.

Landers was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her project, "African Kingdoms, Black Republics and Free Black Towns across the Iberian Atlantic". Landers was one of 175 scholars appointed "on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise" from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants. Landers will deliver the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard University in spring 2013.  The Huggins Lecture Series brings a distinguished scholar to deliver a series of lectures related to African American history. Her research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Conference on Latin American History, Vanderbilt University, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Historic St. Augustine Research Institute, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities.     

 

Landers is an Associate of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples, York University and past president of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction and the Latin American and Caribbean section of the Southern Historical Association. She is the President-elect of the Conference on Latin American History. She serves on the editorial boards for several historical journals, including Slavery & Abolition, Colonial Latin American Historical Review, Oxford Bibliography On-line: Atlantic World and History Compass. She has also consulted on a variety of archaeological projects, documentary films, web sites, and museum exhibits related to the African Diaspora. She directs the ESSSS project at Vanderbilt which mounts digital preservation projects in Brazil, Cuba, and Colombia and also the FIPSE/CAPES program which exchanges students between Vanderbilt and several Brazilian universities. The Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Socities (ESSSS) project, directed by Jane Landers and administered at Vanderbilt University, preserves and digitalizes endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to slavery in the Americas. Link here to connect to the web site. WKNO (Memphis, Tenn.) interviewed Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, about her research into the evolution of communities of African descent in the Spanish colonial world. (Listen)

She is currently working on two monographs: “African Kingdoms, Black Republics, and Free Black Towns in the Iberian Atlantic,” and “Atlantic Transformations: The Many Lives of Francisco Menéndez and his Free Black ‘Subjects’”

Courses taught:

Undergraduate
Rise of the Iberian Atlantic Empires
Decline of the Iberian Atlantic Empires
Africans in the Americas
Comparative Slavery
Destruction of the Indies
Pirates of the Caribbean  

Graduate Seminars
Atlantic World History
Readings in Colonial Latin American History
Comparative Slavery
Latin American Studies Interdisciplinary Research