The Department of History and Archaeology will host the 33nd Annual Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture on 16 March 2017 at the Council Room, Regional Headquarters, The University of West Indies, beginning at 5:30 pm. This year’s lecture is to be delivered by Professor Laurent Dubois, Duke University. The lecture is titled, “Listening in on Seventeenth Century Jamaica.”

In this presentation Prof. Dubois will present a digital project called Musical Passage, which analyzes and seeks to sound out five musical pieces presented in Hans Sloane’s 1707 Voyage to the Islands, in order to explore broader questions about how we can reconstruct the early history of Jamaican and Afro-Atlantic music. The presentation will be an exciting journey into the sounds of seventeenth century Jamaica.

The Annual Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture, first held at Mona in 1984, honours the memory of the distinguished West Indian Historian, Elsa Vesta Goveia (1925-1980). Born in British Guiana, Elsa Goveia took her PhD in History at University College, London. In 1950 she joined the Department of History, the University College of the West Indies, Mona as Lecturer in History, and in 1961 was promoted to the rank of Professor of West Indian History at the age of 36 years. With that promotion she became the first female Professor in the University of the West Indies, and at her death in 1980, was the longest serving West Indian Professor. Her major published works include the influential A Study of the Historiography of the British West Indies to the End of the Nineteenth Century (1957), and Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (1965).

The Elsa Goveia Memorial Lectures are regularly published and can be purchased in the office of the Department of History and Archaeology, The UWI, Mona Campus.

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