The 2014-2015 Golz Lecture, sponsored by the Bowdoin History Department, will be given by Laurent Dubois and will be one of the select events that Bowdoin College will stream live to the world from its Live Webcasts site.
The Alfred E. Golz Lecture Fund was established by Ronald A. Golz ’56 in 1970 in memory of his father. This fund is used to support a lecture by an eminent historian or humanitarian to be scheduled close to the November 21 birthday of Alfred E. Golz.
Laurent Dubois is the Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University. He is the author of several books on the history and culture of the French Caribbean and Atlantic World, including Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004), A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (2004), and his latest work, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012). He also has an interest in the relationship between sports and politics. In 2010 he published Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on the history of the banjo, for which he has received several awards, including a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the Guggenheim Foundation. Professor Dubois also served as head historical consultant for a PBS documentary on the Haitian Revolution, which premiered in 2009.
Professor Dubois’s upcoming Golz lecture, “Democracy at the Roots: Understanding Haiti’s Political Culture,” explores three intertwined legacies of the Haitian Revolution on political thought and practice in the country: the largely hostile reaction to it outside the country, the formation of new political institutions and structures, and — most importantly — the creation of a new set of cultural, social, and economic structures that Jean Casimir has called the “counter-plantation” system. He identifies both the main currents and critical counter-currents within each of these legacies, calling attention to the aspects of the latter legacies that seem to him to be the most valuable and worth comprehending and nourishing in constructing new Haitian futures.
