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The History Club is sponsoring a screening of the film Amistad 8 p.m. today in Jacqua Auditorium, Hugel Science Center room 103.
Refreshments will be provided at the event, which is free and open to the campus community.
Victoria Langland, instructor of history, will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterward.
Rated R for violence and nudity, Amistad has a running time of two hours. The movie starts in the summer of 1839 as 53 Africans held captive in the cramped cargo holds of the Spanish slave ship La Amistad break free of their shackles. They arm themselves, and take control of the ship, but are captured by an American naval ship and charged with murder and piracy. The case eventually pits pro-slavery President Martin Van Buren and former President John Quincy Adams, who comes out of retirement to fight the Africans’ cause in the Supreme Court.
Langland has received more than a dozen fellowships, grants, and awards from Yale University, University of Chicago, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Fulbright-Hayes program, and others. She has shared her research though academic publications and conference presentations, including a talk at last year’s meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, and co-edited a book published last year as part of an SSRC series on collective memories of repression in Latin America.
She was Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Latin American History at Yale University, where she is completing her Ph.D. in Latin American history. She holds an M.Phil. and M.A. in Latin American history from Yale, and a B.A. and M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean studies from University of Chicago.
She has mentored Marquis Scholar Meghan Towers ’04 (Carmel, N.Y.) in her yearlong honors thesis research on the growing economic and political power of women in Mexico.