Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, History
Contact
- MH 4.04.20
- jorge.felipe-gonzalez@utsa.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
Bio
Office Hours: TBD
Bio Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez
Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez, Ph.D., is a historian of Latin America and the World whose research approaches the histories of the Spanish Empire, Africa, and the Caribbean through transnational, quantitative, economic, and digital methodologies.
His first book, The Cuban Slave Trade: An Atlantic History (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026), draws on archival sources from Cuba, Spain, France, Britain, and the United States to reconstruct how Cuba—long dependent on foreign carriers—built a locally operated slave-trading apparatus between 1790 and 1820, transforming itself into the dominant hub of the nineteenth-century North Atlantic traffic. As an expert on the transatlantic slave trade, his work advances the concept of the infrastructure of human trafficking—the ships, artifacts, techniques of control, standards of quantification, and knowledge systems that sustained the transatlantic slave trade and enabled its portability across empires and centuries. His second project, The Rise and Fall of Slave-Trading Powers, expands this analysis to a broader longue durée, tracing the transnational portability of slave-trading infrastructures across regions and eras.
His scholarship integrates quantitative methods and digital humanities. He created a dataset of more than 2,000 slave ship arrivals to Cuba (c. 1790–1820), now incorporated into SlaveVoyages.org, the world’s largest digital repository on the transatlantic slave trade. He has participated in the development of The Intra-American Slave Trade Database and The People of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and co-directs the project Cuba and the United States in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1789–1820 at Harvard’s Hutchins Center. He is currently designing an AI prototype for natural-language querying of historical databases, making complex archival data accessible to scholars, students, and descendant communities.
His work has been supported by multiple prestigious fellowships, including two residential appointments at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research (2019–2020; 2023–2024) and a residential fellowship at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris (Spring 2026). He also serves as Partner Investigator on the Australian Research Council’s Pacific Human Trade Database, a multinational project that documents the coerced migration of South Pacific Islanders to Queensland, Fiji, and Samoa in the nineteenth century and engages directly with descendant communities.
Felipe-Gonzalez teaches graduate seminars, including “Teaching and Researching the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Digital Age” and “Historical Methods,” as well as undergraduate courses such as “Caribbean History,” “U.S.-Latin America Relations,” and “Cuban History.” He incorporates digital technologies, as well as the practical and ethical use of AI, into the classroom.
Selected Bibliography (books, articles & chapters)
- The Cuban Slave Trade: An Atlantic History (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2026).
- “The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Galinhas in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790–1820,” The Journal of African History 62, no. 3 (2021).
- (with Gibril R. Cole and Benjamin N. Lawrance) “The Amistad Saga: A Transatlantic Dialogue,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (Dec. 22, 2021).
- (with David Eltis) “The Rise and Fall of the Cuban Slave Trade: New Data, New Paradigms,” in Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, eds., From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas (University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 177–200.
- “Reassessing the Slave Trade to Cuba, 1790–1820,” in Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, eds., From the Galleons to the Highlands (UNM Press, 2020), 201–22.
Talks & Conferences
- “Foundation and Growth of the Cuban-based Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1790–1820” —
- “The World of Atlantic Slavery and the Slave Trade Before 1619” — April 24, 2024,
- “AI and the Future of SlaveVoyages” — SlaveVoyages: New Research & Uncharted Waters conference, April 3–5, 2025, Hutchins Center. Coverage: Harvard Gazette recap.
- “Amistad: Facts and Fictions of Slavery in Film,” Connecticut's Old State House, September 20, 2022.
Research Interests
- 18th and 19th century Caribbean and Cuban History
- Atlantic History
- Slavery, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
- Digital Humanities
- Afro-Latin American History
