Jane G. Landers is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She formerly served as Grants Officer for Vanderbilt's International Office, Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Science, and Director of the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies.at Vanderbilt. She received her Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Florida and teaches courses in Latin American colonial history, Atlantic world history, history of gender and women in colonial Latin America, and comparative slave systems.
Landers is the author of Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999), and co-author with Douglas R. Egerton, Alison Games, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright of The Atlantic World, 1400-1888 (Wheeling, IL, 2007). She is the editor of Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas (London, 1996) and Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida (Gainesville, 2000). She has co-edited two other books: Slaves, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, 2006), with Barry M. Robinson and The African American Heritage of Florida (Gainesville, 1995) with David R. Colburn.
She has also published articles in The American Historical Review, Slavery and Abolition, The Americas, The Colonial Latin American Historical Review, and The New West Indian Guide, and in a variety of anthologies and edited volumes. She is currently working on two monographs, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Harvard University Press) and Black Kingdoms, Black Republics, and Free Black Towns in the Colonial circum-Caribbean. Her research for these projects has been conducted in archives in Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and the United States and has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, the Conference on Latin American History, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities.
Landers is past president of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction and is on the International Advisory Board of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples. She serves on the editorial boards for The Americas, Slavery & Abolition, Colonial Latin American Historical Review and History Compass Journal and has consulted on a variety of archaeological projects, documentary films, and museum exhibits. Since 2003 she has directed a NEH Collaborative Research Grant with partners in Brazil and Canada to digitize black church records from the slave era in Cuba and Brazil. http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/ecclesiasticalsources
She served as National Director of the History Teaching Alliance from 1998-1991 and regularly participates in outreach to K-12 teachers and in public history programs. Since 2003 Landers has directed an international student exchange program supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education and its Brazilian counterpart (CAPES) entitled "Race, Development, and Social Inequality".
For more on Professor Landers, see her curriculum vitae.
