College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

A roundtable with four historians from the University of Florida, including Bill Link, David Canton, Lillian Guerra and James Gerien-Chen.

The idea is to interrogate how historians’ questions and forms have changed in the wake of Black Lives Matter. This first emphasis concerns scholarly writing — not just at the University of Florida or in Florida but across the globe, from dissertations to monographs and digital history, and within diverse fields and subfields. Heritage debates, iconoclasms, and pedagogical innovations and tones are germane too, since practice matters, entangled as it is with everyday politics, classroom dynamics and tensions, toppled monuments, and ongoing forms of violence. What kinds of novel theorizations, topics, methods, ripple effects, wake-up calls, and elusive dimensions do we, as historians, perceive in our work and in our fields?

We will be wishing Bill Link well, as he retires and departs his distinguished Chair. We will be welcoming David Canton, one of our most recent senior professors in History and the director of African American Studies.

Event Speakers:

William Link (PhD, Virginia ‘81) has written many books about the history of the American South, including Roots of Secession (2003), Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (2008), Atlanta, Cradle of the New South (2013); Southern Crucible (2015); and Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World (2021). After 23 years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Professor Link became the Richard J. Milbauer Chair in Southern History at UF in 2004, where he has supervised dozens of PhDs. Two of his books, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (1992) and William Friday: Power, Purpose, and American Higher Education (1995) won the Mayflower Cup for Nonfiction Award. Retiring at the close of Spring 2022, Bill Link will be missed!

David Canton (PhD, Temple ‘00) is the Director of UF’s African American Studies Program. Raymond Pace Alexander: A New Negro Lawyer for Civil Rights in Philadelphia (2010) won the W. E. B. DuBois Book Award from the Northeast Black Studies Association. He is working on Lawrence Dunbar Reddick: Activist/Historian, as well as Radio Active: Turning Moments into Movements with Joe Madison. He has published about racism, poverty and the lack of African Americans in major league baseball. His courses include: Civil Rights Struggles and History of Hip Hop Music and Culture. He joined UF in 2020 after 17 years at Connecticut College, where he was Director, Africana Studies; Interim Dean, Institutional Equity and Inclusion; Chair, History; Director, Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity Center; and co-director, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program.

Lillian Guerra (PhD, Wisconsin ‘00) is the author of many books: Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico (1998), The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (2005), Visions of Power in Cuba (2012) which received the coveted Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association, and Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958 (2018). She is completing Patriots and Traitors in Cuba: Political Pedagogy, Rehabilitation and Vanguard Youth, 1961-1981 for Duke, funded by an NEH grant. Guerra has also published in The New York Times and poetry and short stories in Spanish. Recipient of Guggenheim and ACLS fellowships, Guerra came to Florida from Yale in 2010.

James Gerien-Chen (PhD, Columbia ‘19) is a historian of modern Japan, China, and Taiwan with research and teaching interests in comparative empires and imperialism, migration and diaspora, and borderlands and urban history. He is completing a book on Japanese imperial expansion in colonial Taiwan and port cities of south China and Southeast Asia during the early 20th century. He shows how patterns of mobility and legal categories shaped Japanese imperialism, Chinese state formation, and overseas networks in Chinese trade and migration. His research has received support from Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Henry Luce Foundation. Before joining UF in 2020, he followed his Columbia doctorate as a Dorothy Borg Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute.