ACH 2025 Preliminary Conference Program
versión en español | version français
Multilingual Connections and Under-Represented Geographies:
56th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH)
Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, June 1-5, 2025
University of the West Indies, St Augustine (Sunday only)
& Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago (all other days)
Sunday, June 1
2:00-4:00pm Registration (St. Augustine Campus)
4:00-5:30pm Panel 1 (Local Organizing Committee Panel)
5:30-7:00pm Opening Ceremony and Welcome Reception
Monday, June 2 (Central Bank of Trinidad & Tobago)
9:00-10:30am Panel 2: Colonial Politics of Health and Disease in the Anglophone Caribbean
Chair: Chelsea Schields (University of California, Irvine)
Samantha Hosein (The University of the West Indies, St Augustine): “Behind Closed Doors: Unveiling the Realities of Asylum Nursing at the St Ann’s Mental Hospital in Colonial Trinidad”
Brittany Merritt Nash (The College of St. Benedict & St. John’s University): “Cholera and the Meanings of Freedom in Barbados”
Debbie McCollin (The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine): “Colonial Testing Grounds: The Tobago Malaria Eradication Trial 1948-1952”
Elizabeth S. Manley (Xavier University): “A ‘Rich, Unexplored Field’: Women, Social Science, and the History of Caribbean Studies”
10:30-10:45am Coffee Break
11:00am-12:30pm Panel 3: Commerce and Illegal Trades in Colonial Time
Chair: Diana Paton (University of Edinburgh)
Marcus P. Nevius (University of Missouri): “Maroon Power and British Imperial Political Economy in Eighteenth Century Jamaica: An Historiographic Paradox”
Florian Wieser (University of Edinburgh): “Truchements of the Caribbean: Language and Strategies of Negotiation in the First French-Caribbean Trade System, 1564–1625”
Melissa Morris (University of Wyoming): “Illegal Trade and Illicit Connections on Hispaniola, 1580-1620”
Alison Clark (University of Edinburgh): “An Axis of Capitalism between Scotland and Guyana: The Cotton Frontier in the Southeast Caribbean and the Rise of Sandbach Tinné & Co. 1790–1838”
Nathalie Frédéric Pierre (Howard University): “Childish Bodies and Haiti’s Second Slavery: The Fourth Phase of the Haitian Revolution and the 1805 Antislavery War”
12:15-1:45pm Lunch
1:45-3:15pm Panel 4: The Mapping and Remodeling of their Worlds
Chair: Ronald Noel (UWI St. Augustine)
Armando García de la Torre (independent scholar): “The Painful Remodelling of Trinidad: The Case of Dominque Dert, 1781”
Joseph Biggerstaff (Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies): “A New Course to the Sea: A Deep History of the Barbadian Gully and the Integrated Plantation”
Marley Lix-Jones (Harvard University): “‘Our People’: Mapping the Social Worlds of Enslaved People on the East Coast of Demerara”
Aakeil Murray (UWI, St. Augustine): “Theorising Pentecostal Conversion amongst Hindu Families in Trinidad through the Lens of Luke 14:26″
Meha Priyadarshini (University of Edinburgh) and Victoria de Lorenzo (The University of Edinburgh): “Connecting Threads: Reorienting Global Fashion Histories through the Madras Handkerchief”
3:15-3:30pm Coffee Break
3:30pm-5:00pm Panel 5: Negotiation(s) and Freedom(s) in the Early-Modern Caribbean
Chair: Carla Pestana (University of California Los Angeles)
Clifton E. Sorrell III (The University of Texas at Austin): “‘Los Palenques’: Inter-Imperial Warfare and Negotiating Black Self-Rule in the Early Caribbean 1655-1660”
Kyle Prochnow (Ursinus College): “Daaga’s War: West African Soldiers, the Yoruba Diaspora, and a British Army ‘Mutiny’ in Trinidad”
Katharine Gerbner (University of Minnesota): “Adga Tome: Damma’s World, From Gbe to Dutch Creole”
Alejandro Manuel Gerena-Ortiz (New York University): “Boricua forty-eighter: Betances, French Republicanism and Puerto Rican Nationalism”
Tuesday, June 3
9:00-10:30am Panel 6: In Perpetual Motion: Colonial Afro- and Anglo-Caribbean Circulations
Across the Seas
Chair: Joan Flores-Villalobos (University of Southern California)
Natalie Zacek (University of Manchester): “Empire of the Senses: The Creole Sensorium of Later Georgian London”
Gunvor Simonsen (University of Copenhagen): “Free Soil and Restitution of Fugitives in the Nineteenth-Century Lesser Antilles”
Rasmus Christensen (University of Copenhagen): “Small Islands and Scarcity in the Leeward Islands and Virgin Islands, late 17th to 18th centuries”
10:30-10:45am Coffee Break
11:00am-12:30pm Panel 7: Shaping a Plural Colony during Revolutionary Times: Trinidad at the Turn of the 19th Century
Chair: Bridget Brereton (UWI St. Augustine)
Cristina Soriano (University of Texas): “Kings, Queens, Dances and Feasts: Resistance and Multiculturalism in Trinidad’s Black Communities, 1805”
Tessa Murphy (Syracuse University): “Slavery on the Frontier: Enslaved Creoles and Intra-American Trafficking to Nineteenth Century Trinidad”
Dexnell Peters (University of the West Indies, Mona): “Francisco de Miranda’s Trinidad as a Revolutionary Atlantic World Listening Post”
Catherine Peters (College of William and Mary): “The Marketplace and the Open Boat: Asian Men in Early-Nineteenth Century Trinidad”
Patrick Murphy (University of Chicago): “Police, Processions, and Pacification: The Canboulay and Hosay Riots in 1880s Trinidad”
12:15-1:45pm Lunch
1:45-3:15pm Panel 8: Bringing Caribbean Women out of the Shadows
Chair: Clara Palmiste (University of the French Antilles)
Sophia Monegro (The University of Texas at Austin): “Las Ganadoras: Black Women Enterprising Freedom in Colonial Santo Domingo (1542-1570s)”
Daniel Livesay (Claremont McKenna College): “Plantation Resistance by Elder Jamaican Women”
Shivalli Ragbir (The University of the West Indies, St Augustine): “Female Invisibility within the Justice System: Crimes Against Women in Trinidad 1900-1962”
Takkara Brunson (Texas A&M University): “Afro-Diasporic Womanhood and the Photographic Archive of Eusebia Cosme Y Almanza, 1920s-1950s”
3:15-3:30pm Coffee Break
3:30-4:30pm Panel 9: Poster session
Chair: Carlton Mills (Director of Mills Institute)
Gabriel José Rivera Cotto (Yale University): “Freedom at Bay: Enslaved Labor and Resistance in the Port of San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1800-1850”
Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles (UCLA): “Survey of Caribbean Education: Preliminary Results”
6:00pm Book launch and reception (Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago)
Wednesday, June 4
9:00-10:30am Panel 10: The Legacies of British Colonialism
Chair: Leslie James (Queen Mary University of London)
Olivia Wyatt (Queen Mary University of London): “Caribbean Migrants and the Negotiation of Pigmentocracy in Britain, 1948-78”
Deanna Lyncook (Queen Mary University of London): “Colonial Legacies within Education: The Migration of Caribbean Children to Post-War Britain”
Christopher Montague (Northwestern University): “Anticolonial Strategists: Norman Manley and Noel Nethersole as Neither Sell-Outs nor Heroes”
Terencia Kyneata Joseph (University of the Southern Caribbean): “A Campaign to Eliminate a ‘Vulgar and Corrupt Dialect’: Patois in St. Lucia, 1880-1920″
Jan Bant (Radboud University & University of Curaçao): “Sport in Small Spaces: Baseball and the Negotiation of Postcolonial Belonging in the Dutch Caribbean Diaspora”
10:30-10:45am Coffee Break
10:45am-12:15pm Panel 11: Immigration and Caribbean Diasporas in the Amazon and Circum-Caribbean
Chair: Tanalís Padilla (MIT)
Martha Arguello (Scripps College): “Painting Nicaragua: A Dialogue Between History and the Visual Arts of the Atlantic Coast and Solentiname”
Jeanette Charles-Marquez (University of California): “Crossing Waters: Afro-Atlantic Historical Convergences from Venezuela, Trinidad, and Nigeria”
Cindy Forster (Scripps College): “Afro-Venezuelan Socialism through a Particular History of Fisherfolk”
1:30pm Optional Field Trip: Angostura Ltd.
In the tradition of the Association of Caribbean Historians Conference, Wednesday afternoon is left unscheduled to allow participants the opportunity to explore the historic sites and cultural opportunities of Trinidad.
Thursday, June 5
9:00-10:30am Panel 12: Trans-Caribbean Connections Across Time & Space: Black Activism in the Nation-State and Anticolonial Geographies (1834-2010)
Chair: Laura Rosanne Adderley (Tulane University)
Chelsey R. Smith (University of Illinois): “Formal and Informal Teaching and Learning in Post-Abolition Afro-Jamaican Communities”
Eloy Romero Blanco (University of Pittsburgh): “From U.S. Expansionism to Cuban Independence: The Cuban Trans-Caribbean Network in the Aftermath of the López Expeditions”
Kiana Knight (Brown University): “Panamanian Women’s Bilingualism in Education and Racial Uplift”
Manuel Osvaldo Robles (Hampden-Sydney College): “Padre Glyn Jemmott: The Father of the Afro-Mexican Movement, 1997-2010”
10:30-10:45am Coffee Break
10:45am-11:45pm Panel 13: Protest Movements in 20th Century Caribbean
Chair: Richard Blackett (Vanderbilt University)
Llana Barber (University of Minnesota): “Decolonization and the Nativist State: A History of Haitians and anti-Haitianism in the Bahamas”
Melanie R. Holmes (University of South Carolina): “Black Freedom Fighters Everywhere’: Barbados, Black Internationalism, and the Transatlantic Battle for Black Power”
Jeffrey R Kerr-Ritchie (Howard University): “The Diasporic Dimensions of British Caribbean Protest, 1918-1921”
Thomas van Gaalen (Radboud University): “Exiles and Oil Workers: Solidarity as Patronage and Curaçao’s Unión 1929 Union General de Trabajadores”