Undergraduate Research @ SFSC

Dr. Milanich’s talk is called “Women in Spanish Moss Sarongs and Alligators with Ears: Theodore de Bry’s Famed 1591 Engravings of Florida Indians.” These controversial engravings are the first and most complete record of Florida’s vanished First Peoples, but they have long been seen as marked by artistic license. Were they spawned from imagination, written accounts, and borrowings from previously published images or based on paintings done by a French colonist, Jacques le Moyne?. According to Milanich, there is a 420-year-old mystery here involving Sir Walter Raleigh, English investors, a dead French artist, a live English artist, a prolific British promoter, the lost Roanoke colony, two French noblemen, and ancient Picts from the British Isles. Through his illustrated presentation, Dr. Milanich will unravel the mystery.

Dr. Jerald T. Milanich is professor emeritus at the University of Florida.

Dr. O’Sullivan presented “Have Ye Not Hard of Floryda?: Early Spanish, French, Portuguese, English, and Latin Accounts of Florida.” “I’m actually finishing up a manuscript on the state’s colonial literature in Spanish, French, Latin, Portuguese, and English,” he said. When explaining the title of his presentation, Dr. O’Sullivan said, “That’s, of course, the title of the first English poem about Florida, printed in either 1563 or 1564—the year Shakespeare was born.”

Dr. Maurice O'Sullivan is professor of English at Rollins College.

Mahler specializes in telling Florida folklore and draws her presentation from tales in the Seminole, African-American, and Florida Cracker traditions. Combining education and entertainment, she has also performed stories about Florida throughout the state, at the Florida Folk Festival, and at the Philadelphia Folk Festival.

Ms. Carol Mahler is a storyteller and singer-songwriter from Arcadia, Florida.