Tuesday 11 March 2025, 5pm
Main Seminar Room, Latin American Centre
All welcome
Speaker: Reinaldo Funes-Monzote (University of Havana)
The Caribbean basin (Islands and continental territories) is one of the most vulnerable regions to the impacts of climate change. A historical approach to the environmental history of the Greater Caribbean is critical to understanding the challenges of the climatic crisis within the long patterns of human interactions with nature during centuries of colonization and imperialist control over natural resources, the rise and fall of the plantation system from the days of slavery to the twentieth century, waves of migrations or the more recent expansion of mass tourism. To understand this process better, it is necessary to connect economic, social, political, or cultural history with the current Environmental History and Environmental Humanities approach. In this talk, I will emphasize the common historical patterns of human interaction with the rest of nature in the wider Caribbean, even considering the diversity and particularities of the national or regional histories within the basin. In search of common ground, I will embrace the social metabolism methodology to explore the long-term flows of material and energy and study the ecological transitions in the Great Caribbean through the dialogue between the Social Sciences and Humanities and the Natural Sciences.
Reinaldo Funes-Monzote is Professor of History at the University of Havana and Director of the Geo Historical Research Program at the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation (Cuba). He is the author of From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492 (2008), and Nuestro viaje a la luna. La idea de la transformación de la naturaleza en Cuba durante la Guerra Fría (2019). Coauthor with Dale Tomich, Rafael de Bivar Marquese, and Carlos Venegas of Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery. A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth Century Atlantic World (2021) Editor of Naturaleza en declive. Miradas a la historia ambiental de América Latina y el Caribe (2008) and Usos agrarios, mensura y representación en Cuba, siglo XIX (2023), with José Antonio Piqueras. His research work focuses on the environmental history of Cuba and the Greater Caribbean. Currently president of the Cuban Society for the History of Science and Technology and member of the Academy of the History of Cuba. He was a visiting professor at Yale University (2015-2020), a fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (spring, 2023), and a fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Studies (2023-2024).
Caribbean Studies Network, TORCH Networks
