Programme

Pregnancy, Childbearing and Infant Care: Historical Perspectives from Slave and Non-Slave Societies

Wednesday 8 April

10.15

Welcome

Chair: Maria Helena Machado, Universidade de São Paulo

 10.30-12.30 Panel One: Thinking through Motherhood: Slavery and Beyond

Chair: Diana Paton, Newcastle University

  • Sarah L. Franklin, Motherhood and Slavery in Cuba
  • Angela Davis, Themes in British and European maternity care since 1700
  • Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Slave mothers: hidden images in the paintings of Nicolas-Antoine Taunay
 12.30-1.30 Lunch
 1.30-3.30

Panel Two: The Politics of Wetnursing

Chair: Selina Patel, Newcastle University

 
  • Rebecca Winer, The Enslaved Wet-nurse as Nanny: Positing a transition from free to slave Labor in late medieval Spain
  • Maria Helena Machado, Between Two Beneditos: Slave Wet-Nurses amid Slavery’s Decline in Southeast Brazil
  • Emily West and Rosie Knight, Mother's Milk: enslaved wet-nursing in the US South

 

 3.30-4.00 Break
 4.00-5.30

Keynote address

Chair: Emily West, University of Reading

 
7.30 Dinner in local restaurant

 

Thursday 9 April

9.00-11.00

Panel Three: Fertility, Population, and the Politics of Knowledge

Chair: Maria Helena Machado, Universidade de São Paulo

 
  • Katherine Paugh, Conceiving Fertility in the Age of Abolition: Slavery, Sexuality, and the Politics of Knowledge
  • Alexandra Cornelius, 'The Offspring No Longer Needs the Care of the Mother': Race, Labor and Social Scientific Constructions of Black Motherhood
  • Mytheli Sreenivas, Recasting Motherhood in the Era of Population Control: Examples from Postcolonial India

 

 11.00-11.30 Break
 11.30-1.30

Panel Four: Medicine and Motherhood

Chair: Rosie Knight, University of Reading

 
  • Lorena Silva Telles, Slave women, breastfeeding and motherhood in nineteenth-century Brazil
  • Stephen Kenny, “Infantile therapeutics” in the slave South: an emerging field of medical research
  • Sasha Turner, “Hot and cold baths [are] necessary to keep patients clean”: Cleanliness and the Health and Culture of Slave Mothers and Infants in Jamaica

 

 1.30-2.30 Lunch
 2.30-4.00

Round table discussion

Opening remarks from Diana Paton and Camillia Cowling