This April, the Eric Williams Memorial Lecture (EWML) is moving from Florida International University to its new home at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Founded in 1999, the series honors the late Dr. Eric Williams (1911-1981), scholar, statesman, and Head of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago from 1956 until his death in 1981. Williams authored Capitalism and Slavery (1944), the landmark study that has been translated into 9 languages, Spanish included (with a Dutch translation forthcoming) and that is still widely read today.Williams also authored a number of other books, among which were History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (1964) and From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969 (1971).
The Eric Williams Memorial Lecture continues in this legacy by hosting conversations about global activism and culture from Williams’s time to the present. The digital launch invites past lecturers of the series to reflect on Eric Williams’s legacy. Beginning Friday, April 9, with the release of a prerecorded conversation between Erica Williams-Connell, series co-founder and daughter of its namesake, andDr. Arnold Rampersad, Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, Stanford University. Williams-Connell is also the founding curator of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago.
