Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, History
Contact
- MH 4.04.20
- jorge.felipe-gonzalez@utsa.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
Bio
Spring 2024 Office Hours: N/A.
Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez earned his B.A., Magna Cum Laude, in History from the University of Havana and his Ph.D. in History from Michigan State University. His book in progress, The Slave-Trading Mafia: Transatlantic Networks and the Foundation of the Cuban-based Slave Trade, the result of over a decade of research with multilingual sources from Cuba, Spain, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, and the United States, uncovers the emergence of Cuba as a leading transatlantic slave-trading region in the Americas as a result of domestic changes in the island and the post-abolitionist rearrangement of trans-Atlantic trading networks and routes. Although rooted in Cuba, the scope of the book is fundamentally Atlantic. It traces the relocation of American slave traders to Cuba after 1808 as a critical factor for the formation of the slave-trading machinery on the island, details the constitution of new transatlantic slave trading corridors during the nineteenth century, and concludes with the socio-political effects of the expansion of the Cuban slave trade in some African communities.
Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez has worked on several digital projects on slavery, such as the Transatlantic and Intra-American Slave Trade Databases and, as a Mellon Fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, on the People of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (PAST). He has been awarded several grants, such as the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World and, together with other colleagues, an Australian Research Council Grant to develop a new digital database on the Trans-Pacific Slave Trade. Some of Felipe-Gonzalez’s undergraduate and graduate courses are “History of U.S./Latin American Relations,” “Teaching and Researching the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Digital Age,” “Slavery and its Legacy in the Digital Age,” “Everyday Life under a Totalitarian State,” and “From Colonial to totalitarian Cuba: 500 years of History.”
Research Interests
- 18th and 19th century Caribbean and Cuban History
- Atlantic History
- Slavery, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
- Digital Humanities
- Afro-Latin American History
