Present committee members (elected at the 2009 conference) and their research interests.
Chair: Christer Petley
Christer Petley is a lecturer in History at the University of Southampton. He has recently completed a book, Slaveholders in Jamaica, which examines colonial Jamaican society and culture in the period leading up to emancipation. His current research interests include the history of the British Caribbean in Atlantic context, and he teaches courses on British Atlantic history, on the history of slavery and emancipation, and on the history of British colonialism.
Vice Chair: Kate Quinn
Kate Quinn is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow/Lecturer in Caribbean Studies at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. Her doctoral thesis focused on cultural policy and nationalism in revolutionary Cuba and post-independence Guyana. She is currently working on a comparative study of Black Power movements and the state in the Anglophone Caribbean. Together with Mary Turner, she convenes the Caribbean Societies in their Regional Context seminar series jointly organised by the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.
Treasurer: Henrice Altink
Henrice Altinkis senior lecturer in Modern History at the University of York where she teaches undergraduate courses on the post-emancipation Caribbean, race and ethnicity in American society c. 1865-1924, and the history of race and MA courses on British antislavery and decolonisation in the Caribbean. Her Phd on Jamaican slave women was published as Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition, 1780-1838 (Routledge,2007). She has also published on the workings off the Apprenticeship System in Jamaica in Slavery and Abolition, Journal of Social History, Journal of Caribbean History, and Social History. Her recent monograph Destined for a Life of Service: Defining African Jamaican womanhood, 1865-1938 (Manchester University Press, 2011) examines the messages that African-Jamaican women were given about their place and roles between the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 and the labour riots of 1938. She has given papers based on this new book at the Society for Caribbean Studies Conference (2003 and 2007), the University of Warwick (2005 and 2006) and the Soundscapes Conference in Barbados (2005) and has also published articles on this theme in, amongst others, the Journal of Caribbean History; the Journal of Social History and ThirdSpace at http://www.thirdspace.ca/vol5/5_2_Altink.htm .She is also interested in ideas about race mixing in the Caribbean and the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An article on this issue was published in a special issue on gender and sexuality of Wadabagei (Spring 2007), of which she is an associate editor. And more recently, she has begun to explore the different forms of racial discrimination in pre-independence Jamaica.
Secretary: Clare Newstead
Clare Newstead is a lecturer in Human Geography at Nottingham Trent University. Her research focuses on changing political geographies in the British Caribbean and, in particular, the place of regionalism in relation to a range of political projects. Her current work focuses on the relationship between regionalism and neoliberalism. She teaches on globalisation, development and transnationalism.
Conference Co-ordinator: Lorna Burns
Lorna Burns is a Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and, for six years, a Tutor in English Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Drawing on a comparative range of 20th and 21st century Caribbean writers, her research explores two of the most prominent developments in 20th century thought: postcolonialism and ‘post-continental’ philosophy, particularly that of Gilles Deleuze. She is author of the forthcoming monograph Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-continental Philosophy (Continuum, 2012), and a co-edited volume with Birgit Kaiser, Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Committee member: Emily Morris
Emily Morris is Senior Research Fellow at London Metropolitan University’s Centre for Caribbean and Latin American Research and Consultancy (CLARC). She is an Economist, specialising in the recent economic history of the Caribbean and current economic policy issues, including debt and adaptation to climate change. Her doctoral thesis (submitted September 2011) was on Cuban economic policy and performance in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Committee member: Anyaa Anim-Addo
Anyaa.amin-addo.2008@live.rhul.ac.uk
Newsletter editor and committee member: Mandy Banton
Mandy Banton was formerly Principal Records Specialist, Diplomatic and Colonial, at The National Archives of the UK; she is now a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has written and published on the regulation of labour within the British empire; is a co-editor of the CD-ROM edition of the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies, 1674-1739 (Routledge, 2000); and author of Administering the Empire, 1801-1968: A Guide to the Records of the Colonial Office in The National Archives of the UK (Institute of Historical Research, 2008).
Committee member: Ronald Cummings
Ronald Cummings is a Jamaican PhD student in the School of English at the University of Leeds. His work focuses on queer theory, Caribbean literature and culture, and discourses of marronage.
Committee member (ex-officio): David Howard
David Howard is a University Lecturer in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Kellogg College. He was previously a Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Geography at the University of Edinburgh, following postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford, the City University of New York and the University of Melbourne.
David’s principal research has concentrated on the contemporary urban societies of the Caribbean and Latin America, with a specific focus on urban livelihoods, social sustainability and identity politics. His interests lie at the interface between social and urban geography, and postcolonial and development studies. Recent research projects have concentrated on empirical work in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, and on the theoretical links between urban territory, crime and discrimination. He is currently working with archaeologists and anthropologists from the City University of New York and the University of the West Indies as part of a National Science Foundation project to assess long-term environmental and societal transition in the Caribbean.
Outwith the University, he is a CNRS Associate at the Centre d’Étude d’Afrique Noire, Université de Bordeaux IV, and the Co-ordinating Editor for the Bulletin of Latin American Research and an associated Wiley-Blackwell book series. As Chair of the Society, he co-directs the Joint Initiative for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean (JISLAC), which supports multidisciplinary seminar networks and seed grants for new research, and is a member of the Latin America and Caribbean Panel at the British Academy. David also represents the Society as a Trustee of the David Nicholls Memorial Trust.
Committee member: David Lambert
Committee member: Pat Noxolo