Bio

Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez earned his B.A., Magna Cum Laude, in History from the University of Havana and his Ph.D. in History from Michigan State University. His book in progress, The Slave-Trading Mafia: Transatlantic Networks and the Foundation of the Cuban-based Slave Trade, the result of over a decade of research with multilingual sources from Cuba, Spain, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, and the United States, uncovers the emergence of Cuba as a leading transatlantic slave-trading region in the Americas as a result of domestic changes in the island and the post-abolitionist rearrangement of trans-Atlantic trading networks and routes. Although rooted in Cuba, the scope of the book is fundamentally Atlantic. It traces the relocation of American slave traders to Cuba after 1808 as a critical factor for the formation of the slave-trading machinery on the island, details the constitution of new transatlantic slave trading corridors during the nineteenth century, and concludes with the socio-political effects of the expansion of the Cuban slave trade in some African communities.

Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez has worked on several digital projects on slavery, such as the Transatlantic and Intra-American Slave Trade Databases and, as a Mellon Fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, on the People of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (PAST). He has been awarded several grants, such as the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World and, together with other colleagues, an Australian Research Council Grant to develop a new digital database on the Trans-Pacific Slave Trade. Some of Felipe-Gonzalez’s undergraduate and graduate courses are “History of U.S./Latin American Relations,” “Teaching and Researching the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Digital Age,” “Slavery and its Legacy in the Digital Age,” “Everyday Life under a Totalitarian State,” and “From Colonial to totalitarian Cuba: 500 years of History.”

Selected Publications:

2022    Coauthor with Henry Louis Gates Jr & David Eltis, “The Constitution and the Slave Trade,” The New York Review of Books, 49:6 (April 7, 2022) 53-54.

2022    Book Review in the Colonial Latin American Review, Evelyn P. Jennings’ “Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana. State Slavery in Defense and Development,” 1762-1835. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 20120. xii + 283 pp. $ 45.00. Hardcover., (forthcoming).

2021    Coauthor with J., Cole, G., & Lawrance, B. “The Amistad Saga: A Transatlantic Dialogue,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. October 2021 (Peer Reviewed).

2021    “Black Lives Matter Misses the Point about Cuba.” The Atlantic, July 17, 2021.

2021    “I Watched Cuba Crumbled from the Inside.” The Atlantic, July 31, 2021.

2021    “The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Galinhas in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790-1820,” Journal of African History. 1-23, 2021.