Life on a Cuban Coffee Plantation: Why Slaves’ Experiences Mattered

Van Norman received his Ph.D. in August 2005 from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He studies the lives and experiences of slaves in Cuba during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as plantation agriculture on the island. His work has focused on how life experience and material conditions informed and shaped cultural production among diverse populations. His publications include a forthcoming book entitled Shade Grown Slavery: Slaves and Coffee Plantations in Western Cuba from Vanderbilt University Press and “The Process of Cultural Change Among Cuban Bozales During the Nineteenth Century.” (The Americas, vol. 62 no. 2 (October, 2005), 177-207.). Van Norman has presented numerous papers and lectures including “Commonalities of Cultivation and Consumption: Coffee and Cuban Plantation Populations” for the XXIX Latin American Studies Association International Congress, Toronto, Canada, October, 2010, and “Conceptualizing Disease: How African Understandings Shaped Responses to Sickness in the Cuban Slave Population” invited lecture for Dept. of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom, October, 2009.