Distinguished Speaker Series | The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making from the Cayman Islands to Key West with Dr. Sharika Crawford

March 17, 2023 | 6pm – 7pm

Tropic Cinema

In her talk “The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making from the Cayman Islands to Key West,” Dr. Crawford will discuss the entangled histories of peoples and commodities that circulated across the greater Caribbean, which connected places like Key West to the Cayman Islands and further south toward Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The story of the humble turtle and its hunter, Dr. Crawford argues, came to play a significant role in shaping the maritime boundaries of the modern Caribbean. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she traces and connects the expansion of turtle hunting to matters of race, labor, political, and economic change, and the natural environment.

About the Presenter:

Dr. Sharika D. Crawford is associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Her scholarship focuses on Latin America, the circum-Caribbean, and the West African nation of Ghana. Recently, her book The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Several institutions generously funded the research and writing of this book. These include the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the American Philosophical Society, and the United States Naval Academy..

Funding for this program was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of Florida Humanitiesor the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This project is sponsored in part by the Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture and the State of Florida, with additional support provided by The Helmerich Trust. Additional support from Aloys & Carol Metty and The John & Marilyn Rintamaki Family Charitable Fund.