Sarah Seidman

My dissertation, “Venceremos Means We Shall Overcome: The African American Freedom Struggle and the Cuban Revolution, 1959-1979,” explores transnational solidarity between the black liberation movement and the Cuban Revolution. It examines the experiences of African American activists who visited Cuba or lived there in exile, along with Cuban representations of the black freedom struggle and African American conceptions of the Cuban Revolution in cultural discourse. While substantive differences and ambivalent interactions clouded their shared visions, persistent African American and Cuban convergences shed light on the nature of both Cuba’s revolutionary project and the African American postwar struggle for change.

Education: B.A. American Studies, Wesleyan University, M.A. Public Humanities, Brown University

Research Interests: Transnational American Studies, Twentieth Century U.S. Cultural and Political History, African American History, U.S.-Latin American Relations, Visual Culture, Public Humanities

Courses Taught:
“A-Bombs, Milkshakes and Love-Ins: Decades of Change in America, 1940-1970,” Summer 2009-Summer 2011
“The Medium is the Message: Visualizing the 1960s,” Spring 2010

Selected Publications:
“Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity: Stokely Carmichael in Cuba,” Journal of Transnational American Studies (forthcoming, 2011)

With Paul Buhle, “Afterward” in Che Guevara: A Graphic Biography (Verso, October 2008)

Review of “David Macaulay: The Art of Drawing Architecture,” National Building Museum, Journal of American History (June 2008)

Selected Conference Presentations:
“Disparate Icons: Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis in Cuba,” in “Cuba Futures: Past and Present,” Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, City University of New York, March 31 - April, 2011

“Solidarity ‘NOW!’: Tricontinentalism, African Americans, and Cuban Political Posters,” Boston University Graduate Student American Political History Conference, “Expanding the Political: Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture,” Boston University, April, 2010

“African Americans and the Cuban Revolution: Political Solidarity and Cultural Production, 1959-1979,” Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, Tepoztlán, Mexico, July, 2009

“Visualizing Democracy: Political Graphics and Public Humanities,” New England American Studies Association, Yale University, September, 2008

Selected Professional Experience:
Research Assistant, Assistant Professor Samuel Zipp, Brown University, 2009
Research Assistant, Department of American Studies, Brown University, 2008
Research Intern, Center for the Study of Political Graphics, 2007
Research Intern, National Museum of American History, 2007

Awards and Honors:
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Early Career Fellowship Program Dissertation Completion Fellow, 2011-2012
Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant, 2009
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America Dissertation Fellow, Brown University, 2007-2009

Professional Affiliation:
American Studies Association (ASA)
American Historical Association (AHA)
Latin American Studies Association (LASA)