Caribbean slavery expert to speak at Grand Valley

Verene A. Shepherd will speak on "Slavery, Shame, and Pride: Commemoration and Symbolic Decolonization in the Caribbean," on Thursday, November 8, at 7 p.m. in Grand Valley State University’s Loosemore Auditorium, DeVos Center, 401 W. Fulton, Pew Grand Rapids Campus.

Shepherd presents Grand Valley’s final lecture in the “Remembering the Crossings” series, which has promoted awareness of 2007 as the bicentennial of the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. She has organized numerous conferences on Caribbean history and has received nine scholarships and grants, including a Scouloudi Foundation Historical Award.

Shepherd is president of the Association of Caribbean Historians and chair of the board of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust and chair of the Jamaica National Bicentenary Committee. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1988, and is a professor of social history at the University of West Indies, Mona.

Shepherd’s latest book, published in 2007, is I Want to Disturb My Neighbor: Lectures on Slavery, Emancipation and Post-Colonial Jamaica . She is editor of Freedom Delayed and co-author, with Hilary Beckles, of Trading Souls: Europe’s Transatlantic Trade in Africans and Saving Souls: The Struggle to End the Transatlantic Trade in Africans , all published in 2007 to mark the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Trade in Africans. Her current research interests focus on Jamaican economic history, Caribbean women’s history, and migration studies.

For more information visit www.gvsu.edu/abolition or call Steeve Buckridge at x18550.