Hosted by the Institute of Caribbean Studies (ICS) at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras (UPR-RP), prize-winning historian Ada Ferrer will deliver the lecture “Cuba: The Scales of History” at Amphitheatre 2, General Studies, UPR-RP, on April 3, 2025, at 2:30pm (EST). The commentator will be Dr. Jorge Rodríguez Beruff (UPR-RP). [Many thanks to the director of the ICS, Don E. Walicek, for bringing this item to our attention. See more information below.]
The Institute of Caribbean Studies is pleased to announce the visit of the Pulitzer-Prize Winning author, Ada Ferrer of Princeton University. Ferrer is visiting to give a public lecture titled “Cuba: The Scales of History”. Her lecture will take place in the context of the annual Gordon K. and Sybil Farrell Lewis Annual Memorial Lecture, which was established to honor the memory of the two scholars for which it is named and recognize the formative contributions that they made to the development of Caribbean studies.
Ferrer’s lecture will take place at 2:30 pm on Thursday, April 3rd in Amphitheatre 2 of the College of General Studies on the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras Campus. The lecture will be transmitted live on the Institute’s YouTube channel to make it accessible for those who cannot attend in person.
Ferrer will draw on her recent Pulitzer-prize winning book, Cuba: An American History, to reflect not only the island’s history and its relationship to the United States, but also to reflect on the way historians work at different scales of analysis, from the personal to the national to the transnational. Her lecture will encourage the consideration of the ways in which these are always entangled rather than easily separated one from the other.
Ferrer’s history of Cuba won the Pulitzer in 2022. It is the culmination of 30 years of research. The book’s prologue describes the work as “a lifetime of changing perspectives between the country where I was born and the country where I made my life. It is, at the same time, a story that I have inherited and a story that I have created from many other possible ones. It is, in other words, what I have made of my sometimes heavy inheritance.”
Don E. Walicek, director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies, sees Ferrer’s work as one that assists in cultivating regional dialogue and enriching the culture of academic research. He says her visit is timely because it gives the spotlight to ordinary people at the same time that it pushes back against the idea that the past of a country or region is “a thing that can be easily dissected or organized into discrete parts.”
For more information, write to iec.ics@upr.edu or call (787) 764-0000 Ext. 87739.
[Photo above by Owen Egan. See https://history.princeton.edu/people/ada-ferrer.]
Hosted by the Institute of Caribbean Studies (ICS) at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras (UPR-RP), prize-winning historian Ada Ferrer will deliver the lecture “Cuba: The Scales of History” at Amphitheatre 2, General Studies, UPR-RP, on April 3, 2025, at 2:30pm (EST). The commentator will be Dr. Jorge Rodríguez Beruff (UPR-RP). [Many thanks to the
