On Tuesday, January 22nd, Professor Claire C. Robertson of the Ohio State University presented a number of books to the Msgr Patrick Anthony Folk Research Centre Library.
A frequent visitor to Saint Lucia and someone who has done research into the oral history of Saint Lucians, Professor Robertson was in Saint Lucia last year to present a lecture during the Nobel Laureate Festival 2018. Her talk was entitled “Saint Lucia’s Revolutionary History: It’s Important!”
Claire Robertson’s most recent book is titled “Gwan moun sé wimed : elders are medicine – Life stories from twentieth century Saint Lucia,” her rendering of the life stories of 57 elderly Saint Lucians from all over St. Lucia, as related to her in the early 2000s.
She is Professor Emerita of History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University, also adjunct professor at Indiana University in the US. This work makes her eighth book; two of them have won book prizes.
She has also published over 55 articles, many of which deal with slavery in Africa and the Americas, but also with African market women and systems, based on research in Ghana and Kenya. Two of her articles relate specifically to Saint Lucia: “Racism, the Military, and Abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury Caribbean,” Jl. of Military History 77, 2 (April, 2013): 433-61, and “Claiming Freedom: Abolition and Identity in Saint Lucian History,” Jl. of Caribbean History 34, 1-2 (2001): 89-129.
Claire Robertson’s work covers specialties in African and Women’s History, with much interest in the Caribbean.
She has been affiliated with the Msgr. Patrick Anthony Folk Research Centre for many years. The Centre greatly facilitated her research over the period.
She is strongly committed to the use of oral history to illuminate the history of ordinary people, whose stories are often extraordinary but all too often ignored.
On her visit to St. Lucia last year she distributed several copies of her new book to the Ministry of Education, schools, libraries and persons interviewed for the book.
Given the total loss of all its library holdings in the fire of March 2018, the Centre is grateful to Professor Robertson for the gift of various books, articles and copies of her own publications.
In the photograph, Professor Robertson and her husband make their presentations to Mr. Hilary LaForce, Executive Director of the FRC.
