On September 26, 2023 we heard from Manuella Meyer, Ph.D. of the University of Richmond. The topic of her lecture, “Psychoanalyzing the Possessed: Spirits of the Dead in Early Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” provided attendees with an educational exploration about early psychiatry and spiritism in Rio during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

On October 11, 2022 Professor Sharika D. Crawford's Greer Lecture in Latin American History drew on her book "The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making."

On October 5, 2021 Professor Johanna Londoño discussed the difficulty of visualizing barrios—Latinx majority neighborhoods--in built environments that are going through processes of urban change, such as urban renewal and gentrification. The talk was based on her book, "Abstract Barrios: The Crisis of Latinx Visibility in U.S. Cities."

Erika Edwards, associate professor of History at UNC-Charlotte specialist in the history of race and Argentina, discussed how Black women in the country reshaped their racial classifications in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her recent book, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (2020), is already foundational in reshaping discussions of race in Argentina.

Watch Hiding in Plain Sight on YouTube.

The first Greer Lecture in 2019 invited Martha Few, Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, to discuss her research. A historian of medicine, gender, and science, Professor Few’s work examines the cultural and social intersections of nature in Latin America. Focusing on Guatemala, her research has explored unconventional topics that have wider implications for specific institutions. For example, her first book, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (2002), examined the history of gender in Guatemala to understand how the Church shaped the role of women in society. She followed this book up with an article on the cultural history of chocolate production in Central America during the colonial period (1492-1821), which gives context to the journey of cacao pods from bitter fruit to the sweet delicacies we enjoyed to this day. Her latest book continues her look at revealing topics. Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean in the Spanish Empire, (co-authored with Zeb Tortorici and Adam Warren) explored the complication of: what happens when an expectant woman dies? Examining diocesan records as well as church archives, the book underscores the clerical conversations and anxieties priests as serving both as physician and baptizer in the colonial period.