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Migration in Human HistoryMaster ClassIn-Person

José C. Moya

Wednesday, Oct 30, 2024

9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m

Barnard College has been a distinguished leader in higher education for women for over 135 years and is today the most sought after private liberal arts college for women in the nation. Its partnership with Columbia University, combined with its setting in a global city, its strength in STEM, and its unwavering dedication to the advancement of women, makes Barnard unique among liberal arts colleges today.

In this class, renowned scholar José C. Moya will discuss migration as a basic human feature, seen in the spread of humanity from our East African cradle, and the emergence of cultural and physical diversity within our species—what we call ethnicity and race. We will then explore migration as European colonial expansion: how a region that occupies only seven percent of Earth’s land mass came to control eighty percent of the planet and force new forms of migration starting in the 1400s, such as conquest, indentured servitude, and chattel slave traffic in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Later, we will consider an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of human mobility: mass long-distance migration between the 1840s and 1930, before ending with an overview of global migration today.

WORLD HISTORY, SOCIAL STUDIES, GEOGRAPHY

José C. Moya

José C. Moya is a professor of history and director of the Forum on Migration at Barnard College, director of the Greater Caribbean Studies Program at Columbia University, and professor emeritus at UCLA. Among his more than fifty publications is the acclaimed Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930; World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century, co-authored with Adam McKeown; Handbook of Latin American History; Immigration, Culture and Socioeconomic Development in the United States, Canada, and Latin America; and Atlantic Crossroads: Webs of Migration, Culture and Politics between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, 1800-2020. His works have been translated to Spanish, Galician, Portuguese, French, German and Mandarin.