Directory

Research Interests

• History of the Atlantic World
• History of the Early Modern English Caribbean
• Race and Slavery in the Americas
• Approaches to the Archive

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, 1660-1760, 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 eighteenth 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: 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, 1660-1760. 
• 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

• “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.