GWENDOLYN MIDLO HALL
October, 2001
1300 Dante Street
New Orleans, La. 70118
Tel: (504)-861-2800
FAX (504)-861-6510
email: ghall1929@aol.com

Professor Emerita of History, Rutgers University. Taught Latin American and Caribbean history.

EDUCATION: Ph. D., Latin American History, University of Michigan, 1970; M.A., Latin American History, University of the Americas, 1963; B.A., history, University of the Americas, 1962.

PUBLISHED BOOKS

Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: L.S.U Press, 1992, paperback edition, 1995). This book received nine prizes. See below for some evaluations by the prize committees.

Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: a Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971). Paperback edition, (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 199

Editor, Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (colored): The New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson During World War II (Champaign/Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1995) Paperback edition 2000.

FORTHCOMING BOOK:

African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).

AWARDS AND PRIZES FOR SCHOLARSHIP:

2001. Included in 2,000 Outstanding Scholars of the 20th Century (Cambridge, England: International Biography Center, forthcoming, 2001).

1997. Appointed Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Ministry of Culture of France. Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Ministère de la Culture de France.

1997: One of the approximately 50 living women historians to be included in the bio-bibliographical reference work, Jennifer Scanlon, ed., American Women Historians from 1700 to the Present , Greenwood Press, 1997.

1996. John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.

1994. Humanist of the Year, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

1997-1999. Served on prize committee for the Wesley Logan book prize in African Diaspora History, awarded jointly by the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History.

1997. Elected Elder of the African Heritage Studies Society.

1997. George W. Lucas Community Service Award, New Orleans Chapter, NAACP.

    1. Principal Investigator of "Africans in Spanish and Early American Louisiana," a Collaborative Research Project, Division of Research Programs, National Endowment for the Humanities, with Patrick Manning as co-investigator.

FILMS AND HISTORICAL DRAMA:

A musical stage play, Black Swamp, is in production premiering December 7, 2001 in New Orleans. It is based upon my musical screen play, "La Cipriere," about runaway slave communities in the cypress swamps surrounding New Orleans, based upon research in documents and Louisiana Creole slave songs. It was originally published in Chicory , a magazine devoted to Afro-Louisiana culture I, 1, (Fall, 1988).

Consultant for a four sequence PBS documentary film series about the African slave trade under production by Firelight Media.

TELEVISION APPEARANCES SOON TO BE BROADCAST:

PBS SERIES, LIFE IN BOLD, a one hour broadcast about race in the United States to be broadcast November, 2001.

NEW JERSEY PUBLIC BROADCASTING, lecture and demonstration sponsored by Middlesex County New Jersey Culture and Heritage Commission.

LOUISIANA PUBLIC BROADCASTING SERIES CELEBRATING THE BI-CENTENNIAL OF THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE, FIRST SEGMENT, TO BE REBROADCAST IN 2003 WITH THE ENTIRE SERIES.

PUBLISHED DATABASE COMPACT DISK

Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy , (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, March, 2000).

Received the 2001 Award of Merit of the American Association for State and Local History.

2000-2001. Widespread print and television media attention beginning with a front page story in the New York Times, Sunday July 30, 2000.

 

BOOKS IN PROGRESS

Memoirs. Race, Freedom, and History: Pages From My Life

The Race and Violence in the Deep South

 

 

 

PRIZES WON BY AFRICANS IN COLONIAL LOUISIANA:

1) The John Hope Franklin Prize awarded by the American Studies Association.

"In making its selection of Africans in Colonial Louisiana, the committee cited the book's wide range of original research and its certain impact on many fields of American culture. Providing a solid ground for theory in extensive and difficult archival documentation, the book combines work in African American history, diaspora and Caribbean culture, anthropology, linguistics, and colonial American history. It opens to view a new transnational conception of the American culture that grew from slavery and from slave resistance, and describes a process of creolization whose full effects have perhaps only become apparent, at least to scholars, in the present day. More than any of the more than one hundred books submitted to the committee by publishers throughout the country, Africans in Colonial Louisiana promises to shape the course of future research in American studies for many years to come."

2) For the Willie Lee Rose Prize of the Southern Association for Women Historians:

"Hall's complex rendering of the mix of cultures in colonial Louisiana is rich, impressive, compelling. Her fine narrative style and penetrating analysis highlights ethnic diversity within a developing culture. Hall draws on an impressive array of sources, in French and Spanish as well as English. She traces the transformation of Africans from their home in Senegambia into Afro-Creoles in Louisiana. She demonstrates the dynamic of Africanizations within Louisiana culture and emerges with a perspective on the past wholly fresh and convincing. Hall provides us with a model study of the way in which a particular people's culture anchored in a specific time and place can testify to the diversity of American experience. Her thorough and engaging work makes a unique contribution to the history of African Americans, the colonial South and the distinctive culture known as Afro-Creole."

3) The Erniminie Wheeler Voegelin Prize, the American Society for Ethnohistory, for the Best Book in Ethnohistory (honorable mention):

"Using Documentation in Spanish and French, Gwendolyn Hall writes the history of African slaves in colonial Louisiana, employing Eric Wolf's definition of culture as `a series of processes that construct, reconstruct, and dismantle culture materials in response to identifiable determinants. Arguing against treating slave culture in isolation, Hall demonstrates that slaves forged a new culture in America through intense contacts with people of other backgrounds. Hall gives us a remarkably encompassing study of both the African and the Louisiana dimensions of her subject. Her research has crossed both national and disciplinary borders to integrate fresh and compelling information into a presentation that is closely analytical, absorbing, and revealing."

OTHER AWARDS FOR AFRICANS IN COLONIAL LOUISIANA

4) The Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award in American Immigration History by the Immigration History Society.

5) The Elliott Rudwick Award of the Organization of American Historians.

6) The Louisiana Literary Award of the Louisiana Library Association.

7) American Association for State and Local History. Certificate of Commendation.

8) Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States.

  1. Choice Magazine, an Outstanding Academic Book of 1993.

 

RECENTLY PUBLISHED ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS IN PRESS:

"Myths About Creole Culture in Louisiana: Slaves, Africans, Blacks, Mixed Bloods, and Caribbeans," (Cultural Vistas, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 78-89, summer, 2001.

"The Meanings of Mina," in Paul Lovejoy and David Trotman, editors, Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (London and New York: Continuum Press, forthcoming June 2002).

"In search of the Invisible Senegambians : the Louisiana Slave Database (1723-1820)", in Saint-Louis et l'Esclavage, Actes du symposium international sur la traite négrière à Saint-Louis du Sénégal et dans son arrière-pays, Saint-Louis, 18, 19 et 20 décembre 1998, Djibril Samb Editor, IFAN (Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noir, Dakar, Senegal) , Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Initiations et Etudes Africaines N° 39

"Enhancing Universal Identity During the New Millennium," keynote address to conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, SUNY Binghamton, 1997, proceedings edited by Charles Burroughs, Director of CEMERS.

"Historical Memory, Consciousness and Conscience in the New Millennium." Plenary address at symposium about the 300th anniversary of the first French colonization of Louisiana. Bradley Bond, ed., Greater French Colonial Louisiana: Atlantic World Perspetives (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, forthcoming).

"African Women in French and Spanish Louisiana," in Catherine Clinton and Michelle Gillespie, The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, Oxford University Press, 1997.

"Relations raciales en Louisiane coloniale. Politique estatique et attitudes populaires," in Alain Saussel et Joseph Zitomersky, Colonies, territoires, societes. L'enjeu francais, (Paris: l'Harmattan, 1996).

"The Formation of Afro-Creole Culture," in Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992, 58-90.

"El Diablo en el Caribe: los dos primeros siglos de colonizacion," in Del Caribe, Vol. 14, (1989), PP. 58-70. This is a publication of the Casa del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba.

"Raza y libertad: La manumisión de los esclavos rurales de la Luisiana bajo la jurisdicción del capitan general de Cuba" Anuario de estudios americanos, Vol. XLIII, Seville, 1986, pp. 365-376.

RECENT LECTURES:

February/March/April 2001. Washington, DC, Director’s Lecture Series, National Endowment for the Humanities; Harvard University Workshop on Gender in the Atlantic World; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Provost’s Distinguished Lecture Series,; Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan; Plainfield, New Jersey Black Women’s History Conference; Washington, D.C, National Council for the Humanities; New Orleans, Louisiana, Ethnic Studies Organization Conference; New Orleans, Dillard University Provost’s Distinguished Lecturer; Natchitoches, Louisiana, Cane River Historic Site; Donaldsonville, Louisiana, African-American Museum.

October/November, 2000, Newark, Delaware, University of Delaware; Houston, Texas, University of Houston; Hartford, Connecticut, Connecticut Historical Society; Fairfield, Connecticut, Fairfield University.

August 19-21, 2000. New Orleans, UNESCO Routes to Slavery Project Education Conference. Tulane University. Demonstrated my Louisiana Slave Database and discussed its applications to education.

April 5, 2000. Lake Charles, Louisiana , Banner Lecture Series, Discussed and Demonstrated my Louisiana Slave Databases at McNeese State University.

October 18, 1999. Toronto, Canada. Demonstrated my Louisiana Slave Database and discussed my essay, "Africans after the Atlantic Slave Trade: Randomized, Fractionalized or Clustered?" at the Harriet Tubman seminar, York University, Toronto.

October 5, 1999. New York City, "Africans in the Americas: How to Find Them." Unesco Routes to Slavery Conference held at New York University and the Schomberg Library.

FOREIGN LANGUAGES: Fluent in French and Spanish, reading knowledge of Portuguese.