Meet the new OI Council members

We were excited to welcome five new members to the Omohundro Institute Council recently. Council members advise the OI director and the Executive Board on policy, programmatic, and professional matters of concern to the OI and serve on one of the Council’s three standing committees: the William and Mary Quarterly Editorial Board, the Book Publications Committee, or the Conference Committee. OI Associates are annually invited to submit nominations for consideration by the Council. The deadline for submissions is typically in mid-April.

Marisa J. Fuentes is the Presidential Term Chair in African American History and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History at Rutgers University. Her scholarship brings together critical historiography, historical geography, and black feminist theory to examine gender, sexuality, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic World. She is the author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (winner of the Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize, the Berkshires Conference of Women’s Historians First Book Prize, and the Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians).

Fabrício Prado is an Assistant Professor in the History department at William & Mary as well as a College of Liberal Arts Fellow at W&M. His regional areas of interest include the Atlantic World, Latin America and the Caribbean, and his thematic areas of research include borders and borderlands, comparative and transnational histories, economic history and capitalism, imperialism and colonialism, Iberian Empires, social and labor histories. He is the author of Edge of Empire: Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Rio de la Plata. His current book project, tentatively titled “Inter-American Connections: North and South Atlantic Networks,” analyzes trans-imperial networks of interaction between Rio de la Plata and the U.S. in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions.

Terri L. Snyder is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Her research areas include slavery and freedom in U.S. history and memory, race and gender in early America, and early American cultural history. Her books include The Power to Die:  Slavery and Suicide in British North America and Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia. Her current book project is tentatively titled “Marriage, Slavery, and the Meaning of Freedom in Early North America.”

Bertrand Van Ruymbeke is Professor of American History at the Université de Paris 8 and senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He specializes in French emigration to colonial America and in the construction of the image of America and the New World in France in the second half of the 18^th century. Among other texts, he is the author of L’Amérique avant les États-Unis: Une histoire de l’Amérique anglaise 1497-1776 (winner of the Prix France-Amériques 2013) and of From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (winner of the National Huguenot Society Prize).

Michael Witgen is an Associate professor in the Department of History and the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and he is a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. His publications include An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America. Professor Witgen’s work explores the juxtaposition of Native and European experiences and responses to the process of mutual discovery that created the New World in North America, with a particular focus on the Great Lakes and Great Plains. His current book project Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, Black Lives, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America examines the intersection of race, national identity, and state making in the Old Northwest of the early republic.