Jamaican Professor to lecture in South Florida on issues regarding Haiti

MIAMI – The Latin American and Caribbean Center at FIU and the Digital Library of the Caribbean in conjunction with the Haitian Heritage Museum announce two lectures by Dr. Matthew J. Smith, a lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica in South Florida.

On Wednesday, July 1st from 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. at Florida International University – University Park Campus in the Health and Life Sciences Bldg., Room 362 Matthew J. Smith, PhD Lecturer, History & Archaeology, UWI, Mona will present: “Politics and Resistance in Twentieth Century Haiti”.

On Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 6:30 p.m. Dr. Smith’s lecture will be, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 at the Haitian Heritage Museum (4141 NE 2nd Avenue Suite 105C) in Miami.

In 1934, the Republic of Haiti celebrated its 130th anniversary as an independent nation. That same year, another sort of Haitian independence occurred, as the United States ended nearly two decades of occupation. In the first comprehensive political history of post-occupation Haiti, Matthew Smith argues that the period from 1934 until the rise of dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957 constituted modern Haiti’s greatest moment of political promise.

Event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Matthew J. Smith

Matthew J. Smith is a lecturer in History in the Department of History and Archaeology, at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica. He earned a B.A. (Hons.) from the Department of History and a M.Sc. from the Department of Government at UWI Mona.

Dr. Smith completed his doctoral studies in Latin American History with a minor in Modern U.S. History at the University of Florida. His main area of research is in Haitian politics and society after the U.S. occupation (1915-1934) and Haitian migration to Jamaica in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. He has published several articles and book chapters on various aspects of Haitian history and politics, and more recently a book, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 (UNC Press, 2009).

He has been the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship for graduate studies at the University of Florida; an Andrew Mellon Visiting
Professorship at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Duke University; and a Dubois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellowship at at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

At the UWI, he teaches undergraduate courses on Haitian history and U.S. history. Dr. Smith is a
Board member of the Haitian Studies Association.