Africana studies professor receives Yale fellowship

Oscar de la Torre, an assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies, has received a 2015 fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University.

He will use the fellowship to finish the book manuscript “Leaving Behind the Big Snake: A History of Black Amazonia, 1850-1950.” The work centers on the history of black rural communities in Amazonia, focusing on how enslaved Africans and Maroons used the eco-social characteristics of the region to dig their way out of slavery and how they communicated and competed with the elite and non-elite social groups to build a political identity that is rooted in their African ancestry.