2018 Coastal Perspective Lecture Series
University of Connecticut
Avery Point
Tuesday, April 17th, 7:30 p.m.
“The Creole World of Mullet in Early American Florida”
Michelle Zacks, Ph.D
Associate Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University
Michelle Zacks will discuss the history of southwest Florida’s fisheries. For centuries in the region, multi-ethnic populations harvested and traded mullet (Mugil cephalus), an abundant inshore food fish, engaging in commercial networks that connected the Gulf coast with Cuba and the Bahamas. By the 1820s, these regional networks included captains and vessels from Connecticut and other Northern states. Caught up in the Second Seminole war, the mullet fisheries were brutally dismantled by the U.S. military in the 1830s as a way of solidifying a white supremacist social order based on slavery.
Michelle Zacks has served as the Associate Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University since August 2016. Before that, she worked as a public historian, folklorist, and oral historian, focusing on racial and class dynamics of maritime work and marine conservation on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay and in Florida, Haiti, and Antigua. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Hawai‘i (2013). Her book manuscript, based on her dissertation, is titled “The People’s Fish: Florida Mullet and the Coastal Commons.”
Lecture series is FREE and open to the public. Lectures begin at 7:30 p.m.
Please join us for our 22nd season. This annual lecture series attempts to span the breadth of human interactions with coastal waters, including speakers from the natural and social sciences. All lectures are held in the auditorium, which is located on the second floor of the Academic Building (disabled accessible). Enter through the Academic Building or through the Student Center. There is a limited-capacity elevator on the first floor of the Academic Building. Please call us with your questions, or concerns, on the limited-mobility access points to the auditorium at 860-405-9025, or email Noreen.blaschik@uconn.edu.
This series is sponsored by UCONN Avery Point, the Connecticut Sea Grant College Program, the Department of Marine Sciences, UCONN and the Maritime Studies Program, UCONN. For more information, a printable lecture flyer, or a campus map, visit our website at http://marinesciences.uconn.edu/lectures/ or email CoastalPerspectives@uconn.edu.
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For more information, contact: Noreen at 8604059025