Directory

Current Projects

I am currently working on my second book project examining the interracial family born to wealthy planter John Peers in seventeenth-century Barbados. Provisionally entitled, The Planter’s Progeny: Family and the Formation of an Atlantic World, 1630-1730, this project traces the lives of the five women with whom John fathered children (including two English wives, two enslaved women, and a white woman from Barbados), his eighteen offspring (enslaved and free), and their descendants. Mining legal records, deeds, wills, plantation inventories, Colonial Office correspondence, shipping logs, and ecclesiastical documents from England, West Africa, and the Caribbean, I am investigating how the experiences of this multi-generational family both reflect and challenge the hierarchies, labor systems, and mobility that characterized the early modern British Atlantic World.

Courses Taught

• History of American Civilization to 1865 (HY 103)
• Nineteenth-Century Black History (AAST/HY 319)
• From Columbus to Castro: Caribbean History Since 1492 (HY368)
• A History of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (HY370)
• Comparative Slavery and Emancipation (HY 411)
• Undergraduate Research Seminar: Slavery in the S.E.C. (HY 430)
• Undergraduate Research Seminar: Social History in Colonial America, 1450-1750 (HY 430)
• Graduate Proseminar: Comparative Slavery and Emancipation (HY 606)
• Graduate Proseminar: United States History to 1865, Atlantic Perspectives (HY 606)
• Graduate Writing Seminar (HY 651)

Books

• Manuscript in progress: The Planters Progeny: Family and the Formation of an Atlantic World, 1630-1730. 
• Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, Early American Places Series, 2013).

Articles & Essays

• “From Perfidious Papists to Prosperous Planters: Making Irish Elites in the Early Modern English Caribbean,” in Ireland, Slavery, and the Caribbean: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Manchester University Press, forthcoming).
• “In the Name of the Mother: The Story of Susannah Mingo, A Woman of Color in the Early English Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly, forthcoming, April 2020.
• “Plantation Life in the British West Indies,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia, forthcoming.
• “Birth and Initiation on the Peers Plantation: The Problem of Creolization in Seventeenth-Century Barbados” Slavery and Abolition (Sept. 2017): 1-25.
• “The Early English Caribbean: Conflict, the Census, and Control,” in The World of Colonial America: An Atlantic Handbook, ed. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz (New York and London: Routledge, 2017).
• with Kristen Block, “Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean,” Past and Present, no. 210 (Feb 2011): 33-60.