Acknowledgments

Kriz, Kay Dian

Save Cite Share

Free

Acknowledgments

Kay Dian Kriz

Description: Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies,...

Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840

~Scholarship on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involves critical engagement with the past and ongoing conversations in the present. This book is in large part the product of many exchanges I have had with friends, colleagues, and students at Brown and beyond — in North America, Britain, and Jamaica. I wish particularly to thank the following...

Author

Kay Dian Kriz

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22581

Acknowledgments

Scholarship on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involves critical engagement with the past and ongoing conversations in the present. This book is in large part the product of many exchanges I have had with friends, colleagues, and students at Brown and beyond — in North America, Britain, and Jamaica. I wish particularly to thank the following people for their support, advice, critical feedback, and friendship: Shelley Bennett, Aviva Ben-Ur, David Bindman, James Egan, Judith Jackson Fossett, Paula Krebs, Robert G. Lee, Evelyn Lincoln, Joanne Melish, Joseph Roach, Rose Marie San Juan, Holly Snyder, David Solkin, Beth Fowkes Tobin, and Kathryn Tomasek.

I am also grateful to Tim Barringer, Ann Bermingham, Gillian Forrester, Michael Gaudio, Catherine Molineux, Felicity Nussbaum, Angela Rosenthal, and Kathleen Wilson for their comments and advice, and also for inviting me to participate in various seminars, conferences, and publication projects.

Wit and curiosity are terms with a particularly eighteenth-century resonance, but they are also qualities I value highly in friends such as Geoff Quilley, Amy Meyers, Claire Buck and Roxann Wheeler — who have been especially important in the formulation and completion of this book. At its inception I was fortunate to meet Geoff Quilley, who kindly shared with me his work on maritime Britain and encouraged me to shape a project around the British West Indies; working with him later as a co-editor only deepened my respect and admiration. When I first arrived at the Huntington Library I was lucky enough to meet Amy Meyers, who spent many wonderful hours with me sharing her vast knowledge of the eighteenth-century world of natural history; I continue to profit from her wisdom and enthusiastic support. Over the years Claire Buck has been unstinting in her willingness to talk me through a problem — particularly with the framing and structuring of an argument; I have benefited greatly from her critical acuity, intellectual curiosity, and patience (at reading yet another draft). I am forever grateful to the (unknown) staff person of the Huntington’s Ahmanson Reading Room, who, in the late 1990s, assigned me a desk near that of Roxann Wheeler. Since that time I have been rewarded with Roxann’s friendship and her extraordinary knowledge of race, colonialism, and literary culture. This project took much of its shape in the scores of phone and face-to-face conversations with Roxann over the years (and in her astute responses to various drafts).

I also wish to thank the excellent curators and librarians who offered me assistance at the John Carter Brown Library, the John Hay Library at Brown, the Huntington Library, and the print rooms at the Yale Center for British Art and the British Museum. In Jamaica I profited from the generosity of David Boxer and Valerie Facey, and the assistance of the staff at the National Library of Jamaica.

This project could not have been completed without the generous financial support of the Huntington Library (through grants from the NEH and Mellon Foundation), the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Center for British Art, and Brown University. These centers of scholarship provided me not only with access to their fine collections, but also the opportunity to have sustained conversations with other scholars.

Many thanks to Jessica Dandona, who was my research assistant at the beginning of this project, and to Hope Saska, whose help in obtaining illustrations and permissions enabled me to finish it. I am also grateful for the support and guidance of Brian Allen, Director of the Paul Mellon Centre, and my editors in London, Gillian Malpass and Sarah Faulks.

A version of chapter one of this book appeared in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 56/1 (January 2000), and, in a more abbreviated form, in a collection of essays I co-edited with Geoff Quilley, An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Some material from chapter two appeared in The Global Eighteenth Century, edited by Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Some material from chapter four appeared in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, edited by Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

Previous chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()