PRESS RELEASE – The Msgr. Patrick Anthony Folk Research Centre will present a lecture by Professor Claire Robertson of the Ohio State University as part of its contribution to the Nobel Laureate Festival 2018.
The Lecture takes place at the FRC headquarters at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, January 29, and is entitled, “Saint Lucia’s Revolutionary History: It’s Important!”
Robertson’s most recent book is titled “Gwan moun sé wimed: elders are medicine — Life stories from twentieth century Saint Lucia”, her rendering of the life stories of 57 elderly St. Lucians from all over St. Lucia, as related to her in the early 2000s.
She is Professor Emerita of History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University, also adjunct professor at Indiana University in the US.
This work makes her eighth book; two of them have won book prizes. She has also published over 55 articles, many of which deal with slavery in Africa and the Americas, but also with African market women and systems, based on research in Ghana and Kenya. Two of her articles relate specifically to Saint Lucia: “Racism, the Military, and Abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Caribbean,” Jl. of Military History 77, 2 (April, 2013): 433-61, and “Claiming Freedom: Abolition and Identity in Saint Lucian History,” Jl. of Caribbean History 34, 1-2 (2001): 89-129.
Robertson’s work covers specialties in African and Women’s History, with much interest in the Caribbean. She has been affiliated with the Msgr. Patrick Anthony Folk Research Centre for many years. The Centre greatly facilitated her research.
She is strongly committed to the use of oral history to illuminate the history of ordinary people, whose stories are often extraordinary but all too often ignored.
On a recent visit to St. Lucia, she distributed several copies of this new book to the Ministry of Education, schools, libraries and persons interviewed for the book.
The general public is invited to attend the lecture.