Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, an assistant professor of history, is the first recipient of the President鈥檚 Ferrari Humanities 糖心logo Award, an award endowed by University of Rochester Trustee Bernard T. Ferrari 鈥�70, 鈥�74M (MD) and his wife, Linda Gaddis Ferrari.
The $25,000 annual award promotes and supports humanities research among tenured and tenure-track faculty across Arts, Sciences & Engineering who are affiliated with the University鈥檚 .
The first award will support research for Sierra Silva鈥檚 forthcoming book, In the Wake of the Raid: Piracy, Captivity and the 1683 Raid on Veracruz. When pirates raided the port city on the Gulf of Mexico, overcoming Spanish military defenses, they kidnapped 1,463 people in Veracruz鈥攊ncluding the entire population of people of African descent鈥攁nd later sold them to slave masters in St. Domingue (now Haiti) and in Charleston, South Carolina. This capture and dispersal of people has never been studied, Sierra Silva says. 鈥淩etracing their movements and experiences is an exercise in imagination and silences. How scholars鈥攁nd we, as members of society鈥攔emember the raid forces us to consider whose records we read and whose 鈥榲oices鈥� we recall.鈥�
鈥淧rofessor Sierra Silva proposes to explore issues that are critically important for how we view our world today, including race and the disruption of commerce,鈥� says Gloria Culver, dean of the School of Arts & Sciences. 鈥淭his is a very exciting proposal for a strong, innovative, and ambitious second book project. It involves a level of depth in thinking and questioning that seems completely fitting for this research award.鈥�
Sierra Silva鈥檚 study will focus on the residents of Veracruz and their forced migration to Haiti and South Carolina between 1683 and 1700. The first two locations present particular research difficulties because no local, 17th-century records survive. 鈥淚nstead, the history of the 1683 raid can only be reconstructed externally, by weaving together fragments of testimony from a handful of European and Caribbean archives,鈥� he says.
He鈥檒l conduct research at the Archives Nationales d鈥橭utremer in Aix-en-Provence, France; the National Maritime Museum in London; and the Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain. He鈥檚 hopeful that his research will also lead to new archival discoveries in the Dominican Republic’s Archivo General de la Naci贸n.
鈥淪uch a multi-site research project will require two to three years of work and would only be possible with the generous support of the Ferrari Award,鈥� Sierra Silva says. The National Endowment for the Humanities has also supported the project.
Joan Shelley Rubin, the Dexter Perkins Professor in History and the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center, says of her colleague: 鈥淗e possesses the gift that makes pathbreaking historical writing possible: an eye for the revealing episode, for the meanings concealed in commonplace events, and, as he says, in 鈥榮ilences.鈥欌��
The Ferraris鈥攍ongtime supporters of the humanities at Rochester鈥攃reated the annual award to recognize a creative research approach that either builds on previously published work or charts a new direction for new publication. The dean of the faculty of Arts, Sciences & Engineering, the dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, and the director of the Humanities Center make up the selection jury, while the University president makes the final award decision.
In 2012, the Ferraris established the to broaden the liberal education of the University鈥檚 undergraduates, enhance the experience of graduate students, and expand the connections of University faculty with other scholars from around the world. The symposia focus on the 14th through 17th centuries. Keynote speakers have included such scholars as Stephen Greenblatt, Anthony Grafton, and Jane Tylus.
Sierra Silva joined Rochester鈥檚 faculty in 2013 and is the director of undergraduate studies for the . He earned his PhD in global history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is the author of Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los 脕ngeles, 1531鈥�1706 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Rubin says Sierra Silva 鈥渆xemplifies the qualities that we hope the Humanities Center, and the humanities at the University of Rochester more generally, help to nurture: critical thinking, compassion, empathy, and a commitment to diversity and inclusion鈥攓ualities especially important at this time of crisis.鈥�
