From left: Dr. Jorge Giovannetti-Torres (University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras); Dr. Mariana Dantas (Ohio University); Dr. Michael Goebel (Graduate Institute, Geneva); Dr. Zaire Dinzey-Flores (Rutgers University).
Dr. Mariana Dantas, Associate Professor of History at Ohio University, was a keynote panelist at this year’s meeting of the World History Association, the leading professional association for scholars and teachers of world history.
Held on 27–29 June 2019 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the WHA meeting took up the themes of “Cities in Global Contexts” and “The Caribbean as Crossroads.” It also represented a first collaboration between the World History Association and the Global Urban History Project. Dantas is one of the co-founders of GUHP, a professional network of scholars dedicated to the study of cities as creations and creators of global historical phenomena.
In her keynote panel remarks, Dantas took on the task of discussing the potential of global urban history as a thematic and methodological approach, and to issue an invitation to World History Association members working on cities to join the GUHP efforts. She drew on her own comparative research on urban slavery and how it had led her to think about the large-scale implications of the practice of slavery on urban labor dynamics, marginal or informal urban economies, and the formation of urban households. Dantas also organized two presentation panels at the annual conference, each on different aspects of urban households in the early modern Atlantic world. The panels examined the emergence of urban households as spaces of power, intimacy, and negotiation, and explored how they shaped some of the characteristic dynamics of early modern urban life in that part of the globe.
Dantas’s first book, Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas (Palgrave 2008), provides a comparative analysis of blacks, slave and free, as urbanizing agents in the Americas. At Ohio University, she offers courses on Brazilian, Latin American, Atlantic, and world history.
For more on Dantas’s research teaching, visit her department profile.
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