Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

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Oren Okhovat (History), Rothman Doctoral Fellow: “Portuguese Jewish Curaçao and the Broader Atlantic World: Economic Pragmatism, Cultural Fluidity, and its Legacy in the Early Modern Caribbean”

The Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao served as a nexus for commercial and social interactions in a complex and interconnected early modern Atlantic world. Oren Okhovat’s research focuses on the influential Portuguese Jewish community that began settling on the island in the mid-seventeenth century and whose members served as intermediaries not only across vast geographic regions but also across political and religious borders. Their deep ties to the Spanish Atlantic world showcase the fluidity of imperial boundaries, both in terms of the movement of goods and people and the tolerance of otherness among imperial rivals for commerce. This presentation will offer a brief look into this world by exploring the scattered nature of the community’s sources. It shows how any discussion of Curaçao’s Jewish history and use of its repositories necessitates contextualization within the history and collective memory of a broader Atlantic web.

Professor Victor Del Hierro (English), Rothman Faculty Fellow: “Decolonizing Cartography: Creating a Participatory Mapping Interface of the Mexico/US Border”

Borderland regions, like the area encompassing Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, USA, undergo continual geo-political transformation due to initial colonial and contemporary settler-colonial violence. Existing maps of border spaces created by colonial powers over-emphasize these regions through their borders, even as border inhabitants move through sanctioned borders in their own ways. Through an analysis of the cartographic construction of existing maps representing the Juarez/El Paso borderland, this presentation will examine how power is embedded in the political border and how that power imposes a problematic spatial meaning on the Indigenous and migrating bodies of this borderland.