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 completing my second book manuscript which examines the interracial family born to wealthy planter John Peers in seventeenth-century Barbados. Provisionally entitled, Next of Kin: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery, this project traces the lives of five women with whom John fathered children (including two English wives, two enslaved women, and a white servant woman), his eighteen offspring (enslaved and free), and their descendants. Mining legal records, deeds, wills, plantation registers, estate inventories, shipping logs and ecclesiastical documents from England and the Caribbean, Next of Kin reveals how the forces of empire shaped the lives of the women and their children, and how in turn the women and children navigated racial and gendered hierarchies in both Barbados and London. By making connections between micro-level familial relationships and the macro-level political machinations of empire, Next of Kin demonstrates the ways that family, patriarchy, and the rise of racial slavery built the early modern English 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: Slavery at the University of Alabama (HY430)
• 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: Next of Kin: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery. 
• 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

• “In the Name of the Mother: The Story of Susannah Mingo, A Woman of Color in the Early English Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 77 (2020): 177-210.
  • Winner of the 2020 Lester J. Cappon Prize awarded annually by the Omohundro Institute for the best article published in the WMQ.
• “Birth and Initiation on the Peers Plantation: The Problem of Creolization in Seventeenth-Century Barbados” Slavery and Abolition, vol. 39 (2018): 290-314.
• with Kristen Block, “Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean,” Past and Present, no. 210 (Feb 2011): 33-60.
• “Plantation Life in the British West Indies, 1650-1850” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, Sue Juster, ed., September 2020).
• “Enumeration and Control in the Early Modern Caribbean,” in The World of Colonial America: An Atlantic Handbook, ed. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz (London: Routledge, 2017): 105-22.
• In progress: “From Perfidious Papists to Prosperous Planters: Making Irish Elites in the Early Modern English Caribbean,” in Ireland, Slavery, and the Caribbean, Finola O’Kane Crimmins ed. (Manchester University Press, under review).
• In progress: “The Wife, the “Whore,” and the “Wench”: Colonial Women and the Development of Racial Hierarchy in 17^th Century Barbados,” in The Construction of Racial Slavery in the Atlantic World, Jesse Cromwell, Marc Lerner, and Paul Polgar eds. (University of Pennsylvania Press, under review).