Sally A. Kellogg Lecture Series

“Uncovering Black Society in 19th Century Florida”

Guest Lecturers

Dr. Jane Landers

Jane Landers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She is Director of the Slave Societies Digital Archive and since 2015 has served as the U.S. member on UNESCO’s International Scientific Committee for the Slave Route Project. Landers’ award-winning monographs include Black Society in Spanish Florida and Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions and she is the co-author or editor of five other books and numerous articles on the history of African and Indigenous resistance in Florida and the Atlantic World. Her research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the British Library Endangered Archives Programme, among others. She has served as President of the Conference on Latin American History and Founding Chair of its Atlantic World Section, President of the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions, and President of the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association. She currently serves as Chair of the Committee on International Historical Activities of the American Historical Association.

Ms. Alcione M. Amos

Alcione M. Amos, an Independent Scholar living in Washington, DC, is originally from Brazil and has lived and worked in the United States for five decades. She worked as a Researcher and Librarian at the World Bank, Washington, D.C., for more than 20 years while at the same time maintaining a career as an Independent Scholar. She then worked as a Museum Curator at the Smithsonian Institution Anacostia Community Museum between 2009 and 2022, when she retired. Her fields of interest include post-enslavement societies such as those of the Black Seminoles and African-Americans in Washington, D.C. after the Civil War, and Afro-Brazilians who moved to West Africa in the 19th century. She also studied the Gullah communities of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. Ms. Amos has published in Africa, Brazil, the United States, and Europe. She has curated three exhibits for the Smithsonian Institution: World Shout Song (2010-11) and How the Civil War Changed Washington (2015), both of them exhibited at the Anacostia Community Museum. Her exhibit Gullah Bahia África (version in Portuguese of World Shout Song) traveled to Brazil in 2015 under the U.S. State Department’s auspices. Her third exhibit, online, We Shall Not be Moved: Stories of Struggle from Barry Farm-Hillsdale (2022), is based on her book published in 2021, Barry Farm-Hillsdale in Anacostia: A Historic African American Community. She holds a Master’s Degree from the Catholic University, Washington, D.C.

Dr. Anthony Dixon

Dr. Dixon is the President of Archival and Historical Research Associated and Adjunct Professor at Valencia College in Orlando. Dr. Dixon specializes in African Diaspora studies and has served as the Field Director of the African American Heritage Preservation Network. His scholarly work includes two books entitled Florida’s Negro War; Black Seminoles and the Second Seminole War 1835-1842 and A Timeline of the African Diaspora Experience in Florida.

Mr. James Bullock

Historian, actor, musician and storyteller James Bullock was born in Cincinnati and attended the Berklee College of Music and Oberlin College of Music in Ohio. A member of the American Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers, James have worked in the film industry in Los Angeles, the recording industry in Santa Fe and in St. Augustine as historian, musician and historical interpreter. He is committed to disseminating the story of his African ancestors in the United States through music, drama and interpretation in different venues across the Southeastern United States.

Ms. Charmin Russell

A native of Trinidad, Charmin Russell was the youngest of 13 children. She learned about her own culture and cooking at the feet of her mother, who is 102 years old. When she moved to St. Augustine she worked in retail management, event coordination and as production assistant, acting and doing voice overs. She also became active in the historical interpreters community first with the Flight to Freedom at the Fort Mose site, continuing with the City of St. Augustine 450th Commemorative celebrations and more recently with the dramatic interpretation of “I Lived Here As Well: A Woman Story” at the Ximenez-Fatio House.

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