New research on the roots of Bermuda’s Gombeys will be presented at a free lecture this weekend given by visiting US historian Heather Kopelson.

Professor Kopelson plans to explore the rhythms and gestures of the Island’s earliest recorded “riotous meetings” held by enslaved Bermudians.

The Gombeys are among the many New World traditions that show clear links back to the African roots of the people uprooted by force and transported for forced labour to the Americas, Caribbean and Bermuda.

Professor Kopelson will also launch her book exploring the links between dance, Christianity and the original belief systems of Africans and Indians. Her talk will riff on what many at the time viewed as a wild and disorderly art form by performers once branded as “that idolatrous procession” by a slave owner seeking a slave’s return.

“When I was beginning research for my doctorate, I became intrigued by several aspects of Bermuda’s early history,” Prof Kopelson told The Royal Gazette.

“The fact that there were no indigenous people made it very unusual, and I was also intrigued by its connections to, and differences from, New England in terms of religious history and of the history of slavery.”

Starting in 2003, Prof Kopelson — an assistant professor of history from the University of Alabama — trawled through archival Seventeenth Century records in Bermuda to explore the roots of the Island’s various faiths.

She has been exploring Bermuda’s past on visits ever since, she said, adding: “I’ve been hooked on figuring out the multitude of stories in the records, and on Bermuda.”

Her book Faithful Bodies: Performing Race and Religion in the Puritan Atlantic, will be launched at 6.30pm tomorrow in the St George’s World Heritage Centre at Penno’s Wharf, courtesy of the St George’s Foundation. Meanwhile, at a lecture in the same location on Saturday night, Prof Kopelson is enjoining her audience to “party like it’s 1709”.

Saturday’s talk opens with a 6.30pm reception, with the lecture commencing at 7pm.