Caribbean Beat editor Judy Raymond to speak at UTT's Distinguished Lecture Series

One of the most interesting and rewarding things about MEP's staff is just how diverse their interests are after hours. Some are rally/race car enthusiasts. Some feature local music and theatre stages. And tomorrow, author and Caribbean Beat editor Judy Raymond will give a lecture at the University of Trinidad & Tobago on the artist Richard Bridgens, as part of their Distinguished Lecture Series.

The English artist Richard Bridgens lived and worked in Trinidad in the 1830s, and drew and commented on what he observed. He took both an artistic and an anthropological interest in the sugar estates and the people who worked on them.

Despite his work often being overlooked or dismissed as pro-slavery polemic, it is now increasingly being recognised by historians and art historians as an important visual record of the last years of slavery. Judy currently is researching Bridgens’s life and work in an attempt to discover more about the meaning of his drawings and resolve these contradictions.

Judy has a BA in Literae Humaniores (Classics) from Hertford College, Oxford, and an MA in Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She has worked as a journalist for over 20 years, and both edits Caribbean Beat magazine and writes a parliamentary column for the Sunday Express. She has written biographical studies of the Trinidadian jeweler Barbara Jardine and fashion designer Meiling, and has recently published an essay on the nineteenth-century painter Michel Jean Cazabon in the December 2010 issue of the Caribbean Review of Books.

For reservations or more information: (868) 642-8888 x 27108 / 27126 or theacademy@utt.edu.tt