Present committee members (elected at the 2009 conference) and their research interests.
Chair and Northern Network: 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.
Email: david.howard@conted.ox.ac.uk
Vice 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.
Email: C.Petley@soton.ac.uk
Treasurer: Henrice Altink
Henrice Altink is a 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 Caribbean slavery. She has published articles on representations of Jamaican slave women and the workings off the Apprenticeship System in Jamaica in Slavery and Abolition, Journal of Social History, Journal of Caribbean History, and Social History. Her monograph entitled Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition, 1780-1838 has been published by Routledge in 2007. More recently she has begun to examine the construction of notions of womanhood in the African Jamaican community in the period 1865-1938. She has given papers on this new research at the Society for Caribbean Studies Conference (2003 and 2007), the University of Warwick (2005 and 2006) and the Soundscapes Conference in Barbados (2004) and has published articles on it 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 will be published in a special issue on gender and sexuality of Wadabagei (Spring 2007), of which she is an associate editor.
Email: ha501@york.ac.uk
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.
Email: clare.newstead@ntu.ac.uk
Newsletter editor: David Clover
David Clover is the Information Resources Manager and Librarian at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.
Email: David.Clover@sas.ac.uk
Website Editor and Society Administrator: Lorna Burns
Lorna works in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow where, in 2007, she completed her PhD thesis, 'Creolizing the Canon: Engagements with Legacy and Relation in Contemporary Postcolonial Caribbean Writing'. She has published a number of articles on Caribbean literature and, in particular, on the essays and fiction of Wilson Harris and Édouard Glissant, including 'Becoming-Postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean: Édouard Glissant and the Poetics of Creolization' (Textual Practice, 23.1, 2009); 'Creolization and the Collective Unconscious: Locating the Originality of Art in Wilson Harris's Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar, and The Ghost of Memory' (Postcolonial Text, 4.2, 2008); and 'Landscape and Genre in the Caribbean Canon: a Poetics of Place and Paradise' (Journal of West Indian Literature, 17.1, 2008).
Email: L.Burns@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
Editor of the Annual Conference Papers: Sandra Courtman
Sandra Courtman was Chair of the Society from 1999-2002 and continues to edit the conference papers for the web site. She teaches literature and creative writing at The Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Sheffield (UK). She has publications arising from doctoral research for a thesis entitled 'Lost Years: West Indian Women Writing and Publishing in Britain c. 1960-1979. She recovered and edited a rare Jamaican woman's autobiography, out-of-print since 1969: Joyce Gladwell's Brown Face Big Master (Macmillan Caribbean Classic, 2003). As a result of editing the Society's conference papers online, she published Beyond the Blood, The Beach and The Banana: New Perspectives in Caribbean Studies (Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2004). For more detailed information please see my home page or email me.
Email: s.courtman@sheffield.ac.uk
Chair of Bridget Jones Sub-Committee: 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.
Email: kate.quinn@sas.ac.uk
Schools Liaison Officer: Ruth Minott Egglestone
Ruth Minott Egglestone completed a PhD in the Drama Department at the University of Hull. A passionate educator and teacher, this current research complements her wider project of documenting the importance and development of the pantomime tradition in Jamaica. Having observed Jamaican pantomime and theatre first-hand as she grew up, she seeks now as an academic to articulate the essential contribution of this form of popular theatre to the Caribbean aesthetic.
Committee Member: La Tasha Brown
La Tasha A. Brown is currently pursuing a PhD degree in Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Her PhD thesis is entitled, 'THE UNIVERSAL AS THE LOCAL WITHOUT WALLS: Yaad/Yard-Hip Hop ~ Reggae and Hip-Hop Music in the African Diaspora'. Her research project is an interdisciplinary comparative study that seeks to examine how children of Jamaican parentage, who came of age during the 1980s and the 1990s in Britain and the United States, constructed their identity by using social memory and popular culture. She earned a Master’s of Arts degree from Florida International University in Miami, Florida in the African New World Studies program. She completed a Bachelor’s of Arts degree in History with a minor in English Literature from St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.
Email: Latasha.Brown@warwick.ac.uk
Committee Member: Lucy Evans
Lucy Evans is completing a PhD in Caribbean literature at the University of Leeds. Her project explores constructions of community in texts which mediate the genres of novel and short story collection. She has published articles on E. A. Markham and Paul Gilroy in Moving Worlds and Atlantic Studies, and has articles forthcoming on Mark McWatt and Dionne Brand in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Caribbean Quarterly. She is currently co-editing a collection of critical essays on Caribbean short stories, to be published by Peepal Tree Press.
Email: eng7lae@leeds.ac.uk