Today we pause for a moment to pay tribute to Professor J. Michael Dash who made his transition on June 02 2019. As Head of the UWI Department of History and Archaeology at Mona, Prof. Matthew Smith wrote in his tribute…
” Michael Dash was born in Trinidad in 1948, one of a generation that had its intellectual coming of age in the heyday of independence in Trinidad and Jamaica after 1962. He went to Jamaica in the 1960s to pursue a degree in French at the UWI Mona campus. There was nothing unusual about this. The campus in the 1960s featured a healthy mix of some of the best and brightest students from across the region who interacted, collaborated, and sometimes married each other. The Mona campus at the time of Dash’s undergraduate years was a rich place for cultural exchange and intellectual growth. It had evolved greatly over the course of a decade from what an earlier undergraduate, Derek Walcott, referred to facetiously as “the ranch” to a gradually more developed place of ideas and culture. Dash would later recall, in a 2012 interview with The Public Archive, “The Mona campus was the place to be in the late sixties. Lloyd Best, Orlando Patterson, Kamau Brathwaite, Rex Nettleford and so on were all on the faculty at Mona. The Wailers played at the Student Union fetes. We had had the Walter Rodney demonstrations in 1968, shut the university down and occupied the Creative Arts Centre. I think the times encouraged risk-taking.” Mona was a place of great ferment for Dash and it became a major part of his adult life.”
As stated by former Dean of the then Faculty of Arts and General Studies at Mona Dr. Pauline Christie at his inaugural Professorial Lecture, Michael Dash was the first Professor in that Faculty to gain both his degrees at the UWI, Mona. He spent two years at The UWI Cave Hill Campus as an Assistant Lecturer and a further two years at the University of Ahmadu Bello in Kano, Nigeria. After returning to Mona in 1976 he was eventually promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1982, Reader in 1992, and eventually Professor in 1994.
In recognition of Prof. Dash’s contribution to academia the UWI Archives is pleased to share this excerpt from his inaugural professorial lecture delivered at the Mona Campus on December 2, 1994. The theme of the lecture “Modernism, Modernity, and Modernization in French Caribbean Thought.
Roots of the West Indian Pelican 