The Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies is proud to announce that Dr Erna Brodber will be an Honorary Visiting Fellow at SALISES Mona for the 2014-2015 academic year.
 
Erna Brodber graduated from the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) in 1963 with a BA in History, continuing to complete the MSc Sociology and the PhD in History from the University of the West Indies (UWI). Her work, over many decades, has followed two distinct, though intersecting courses. Her sociologicalresearch has focused on social history and biography, the study of inner-city communities and the respective roles of race, gender, culture and class in Caribbean society.
 
Among the memorable titles of her numerous articles and book chapters are: “A Study of Yards in the City of Kingston”; “Oral Sources and the Creation of the Social History of the Caribbean”; “Reengineering Blackspace”; “The Emergence of Reggae: a 1986 Review” and “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure”.
 
The last mentioned article makes the intimate connection with her other passion, in that between her formal sociological interventions, Erna Brodber, through her novels, has emerged as one of the leading contemporary writers from the Commonwealth Caribbean. From Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), through Myal (1988), Louisiana (1994), The Rainmaker’s Mistake (2006) and The World is a High Hill (2012), Brodber has developed as a distinct voice with an acute appreciation of the social, cultural and oral spaces of Jamaica and other venues of the African Diaspora.
 
Erna Brodber is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Order of Distinction, Commander Class from Jamaica, the D.Litt. from the UWI Mona and the Musgrave Gold Medal for Literature and Orature from the Institute of Jamaica. She has taught internationally and held visiting positions across the USA and Europe and, most recently, was Writer in Residence in the Department of Literatures in English here at the UWI Mona. While at SALISES Dr Brodber will be working on a collection of essays, tentatively titled “African-American and African-Jamaican Relations, 1782-1944”.
 
Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic StudiesThe University of the West Indies, MonaKingston 7Telephone:  927-1234/ 977-2283Extensions: 2312/2427/2420/2423