Join us Thursday, January 25th, 2024 at 4:30pm for a talk by Lara Putnam- "Sexual Violence and Scholarly Silence: Questions from Early 20th Century Limón, Costa Rica"
How should we assess documentary traces of sexual violence and coercion in the past? Can we do no better than guess that risks of sexual victimization were roughly a constant in women’s and children’s lives? And if so, does that make it okay for us to leave those risks and those experiences out of our narratives? Or is sexual violence important for scholars to discuss precisely because it was continually present in women’s and girls’ experiences and concerns? As an evidentiary base for raising these questions, the paper draws on judicial records from the late 19th and early 20th century Limón, a province in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica. Prof. Putnam will also address questions about her work on research and sources in transnational and immigration research, especially in a Caribbean basin context.
Lara Putnam is UCIS Research Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She researches social movements and political participation in local, national, and transnational dimensions. Her sole-authored books include The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (UNC Press, 2002) and Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (UNC Press, 2013). She is past co-senior editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review, past president of CLAH, and past special editor for digital initiatives of the American Historical Review.
RSVP following: http://tinyurl.com/bdds8n6e