ACH 2026 Preliminary Conference Program
versión en español |  version français

Slavery, its Legacies, Labor, and Maritime History in the Caribbean 
57th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH)

Kingston, Jamaica, May 24-29, 2026

University of the West Indies, Mona (Sunday registration and events)
& Jamaica Conference Centre (Downtown Kingston)

Sunday, May 24

2:00-4:00pm     Registration and Mona Campus Heritage Tour 2:00-4:00pm
4:00-5:00pm     Opening Ceremony and Lloyds Register Feature
5:00-6:30pm     Local History Panel: Jamaica’s Socio-Cultural History in the Early to Mid-20th Century

Chair: Kathleen E. A. Monteith (University of West Indies, Mona)

  1. Bernadette Worrell Johnson (University of West Indies, Mona) “The West Indies and Special Collections in the UWI, Mona Main Library, with Specific reference to 20th c Jamaica’s socio-cultural history”;
  2. Elizabeth Pigou Dennis (University of Technology, Jamaica) “Street, Yard, and Suburb: Kingston’s Diverse Localities Between the World Wars”
  3. Karl Watts (University of West Indies, Mona), “Post Colonial Landscapes in Jamaica: The Transformation of Portmore Since the 1960s”
  4. Julian Cresser (University of West Indies, Mona), “Sports and Nationalism in Jamaica”
6:30-7:30pm     Welcome Reception

Monday, May 25 (Jamaica Conference Centre)

9:00-10:30am     Panel 2: Maritime Worlds and Economies of the Caribbean

Chair: Nuala Zahedieh (University of Cambridge)

  1. Carla Gardina Pestana (University of California, Los Angeles), “Learning the Caribbean Seascape”
  2. Keith Richards (Tulane University), “Creole Economies and the Illicit Slave Trade in Eastern Cuba, 1662-1691”
  3. David Wheat (Michigan State University), “The Maritime Economy of Spanish Jamaica, c.1560-1650”
  4. Lisa Lawlor Feller (University of The Bahamas), “Bahamian Islanders on the Maritime Highway: US-Bahamas Connection through Lincoln and Emerson’s Commitment to Antislavery”
  5. Nyala Thompson Grunwald (University of Cambridge), “No Man’s Land’: Mangrove lands, waters and the histories of marine zones between Trinidad and Tobago”
10:35-11:15am     Poster Session

Chair: Fiona Rajkumar (University of the Southern Caribbean)

  1. Rebecca Goetz (New York University) “The Sylvester Manor and Constant and Carmichael Plantation Collaboration”
  2. Jade Lindo (University of Warwick / Royal Botanic Kew Gardens), “Tasting Resistance: Breadfruit and the Gendered Politics of Caribbean Food”
11:15-11:30am     Coffee Break
11:30-1pm  Panel 3: Enslaved Labor and Social Reproduction in the Caribbean

Chair: Heather Cateau (University of the West Indies, St Augustine)

  1. Alba Giménez-Sánchez (Tulane University), “Building Black Havana in the Late Seventeenth Century”
  2. Mary Draper (Midwestern State University), “Enslaved Pilots and Sea-Lanes in Eighteenth-Century Kingston”
  3. Gabriel José Rivera Cotto (Yale University), “Maritime transportation work and slavery in San Juan, Puerto Rico”
  4. Evelyn Powell Jennings (St. Lawrence University), “Motherly Love and the Business of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Cuba”
  5. Natália da Silva Perez (Erasmus University Rotterdam), “The Job Market for Wet Nurses in 19th-century Cuba, Pernambuco (Brazil) and Quebec (Canada)”
1:00-2:15pm     Lunch
2:15-3:45pm     Panel 4: Marronage and Mobility in the 18th-19th-Century Caribbean

Chair: Rebecca Goetz (New York University)

  1. Louise Salaün (Sorbonne Université), “Writing a History of Women’s Marronage Based on Plantation Records (Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, 1760s–1780s)”
  2. Felicia J. Fricke (University of Copenhagen), “Fugitive Motherhood: Women Running from Slavery with their Children in the Eastern Caribbean, 1770s-1870s”
  3. Tayzhaun Glover (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign), “They were ‘Anything and everything but field laborers’: Martinican Fugitives and Emancipation in Dominica and St. Lucia, 1833-1848”
  4. Yevan Terrien (University of Oklahoma), “Marronage, Unfreedom, and Customary Rights in Caribbean New Orleans (1760s-1770s)”
  5. Zach Myers (University of Cambridge), “Navigating (Un)Freedom: Mobility and Re-Enslavement in the Southern Caribbean, 1834-1854”

3:45-4:00pm     Coffee Break

4:00-5:30pm     Panel 5: Enslaved Childhood, Gender, and Resistance in the Caribbean

Chair: Gelien Matthews (University of West Indies, St Augustine)

  1. Jenny Shaw (University of Alabama), “From St. Kitts to England: Enslaved Childhood on Land and at Sea in the Britain’s Georgian Empire”
  2. Zakiya Doyle (University of West Indies, Cave Hill), “‘I learned the art of running away to perfection’ – Enslaved children and resistance in Barbados 1780-1834”
  3. Sarah Brokenborough (Tulane University), “Visible Labor, Valued Work: Enslaved Girls’ Needlework on Jamaican Plantations”
  4. Taylar Carty (University of Glasgow), “Amelia Frances and the ‘Wicked Incendiary’: Centering enslaved Black girlhood in Caribbean Resistance”

Tuesday, May 26

9:00-10:30am    Panel 6: Enslaved Rebellions and Empire in the Caribbean

Chair: Rodney Worrell (The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill)

  1. Justin Pope (Missouri University of Science and Technology), “The St John Slave Rebellion of 1733, or The Last Stand of an African Empire in the Americas”
  2. Graham Kerr (Royal Navy), “The Royal Navy and the Apparatus of Imperial Enslavement in Jamaica, 1729–1740”
  3. Maria Alessandra Bollettino (Framingham State University), “Black Sons of Hydra”: The Imperial Legacies of the 1730s First Maroon War in Jamaica”
  4. Gelien Matthews (University of West Indies, St Augustine) “Antislavery Rebellions and Imperial Transitions in the British Caribbean, 1816-1831”
10:30-10:45am     Coffee Break
10:45am-12:15pm    Panel 7: Caribbean Trajectories of Enslavement I: From the Middle Passage to Family and Freedom

Chair: Dexnell Peters (University of West Indies, Mona)

  1. Philippa Hellawell (Lloyd’s Register Foundation), “Anatomy of a slave ship: The Trimmer (1765) and its Caribbean trajectories”
  2. Liberty Patterson (Lloyd’s Register Foundation), “Ships to shores: tracing enslaved histories from West Africa to Grenada and Jamaica (1771-1785)”
  3. Fara Dabhoiwala (Princeton University), “Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the early 18th-century Anglo-Atlantic World: The Williams Family of Jamaica”
  4. Hannah Katharina Hjorth (University of Copenhagen), “Claiming Kinship, Claiming Freedom: Entanglements of Family, Kinship and Freedom Seeking in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas 1780-1810”
12:15-1:30pm     Lunch
1:30-3:00pm    Panel 8: Trajectories of Enslavement II: Claiming Freedom, Shaping Rights?

Chair: Anne Eller (Yale University)

  1. Ramona Negrón (KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies), “‘An Irreparable Evil: Half Slavery and Half Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Guianas”
  2. Tessa Murphy (Syracuse University), “Expanding the Archive of Maronnage: A glimpse from Slave Registers in St. Lucia & Trinidad, 1813-1833”
  3. Mary-Anne Nicolaas (KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies et University of Amsterdam), “New citizens, old rights? The introduction of the citizen register in Suriname, 1816-1863”
  4. Adriana Chira (Emory University), “‘Somos precariato del estado’: Communal land ownership in Cuba in the long nineteenth century”
3:00-3:15pm     Coffee Break
3:15-4:45pm    Panel 9: From Slavery to Freedom: Labor Regimes, Land, and Legal Transformations

Chair: Bridget Brereton (The University of the West Indies, St Augustine)

  1. Giulio Talini (University of Turin), “Une république de cultivateurs: Freedom, Land, and Abolition in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue (1793-1794)”
  2. Marvin Chochotte (Dartmouth College), “Inheriting Subdivided Land after the Haitian Revolution: Moral Labor and Family Héritage, 1804-1915”
  3. Gad Heuman (University of Warwick), “The Apprenticeship System in the Caribbean: The World of the Enslavers”
  4. Ida L. Vos (History Erasmus University Rotterdam), “Gender in Discussions about Free Womb in Spanish Parliament, 1811-1870”
6:00pm    Evening Reception (exact time and location TBD)

Wednesday, May 27

9:00-10:30am     Panel 10: The Carceral Caribbean: Labor, Ideology, and Resistance Across Imperial Lines

Chair: Diana Paton (University of Edinburgh)

  1. Estherine Adams (University of Guyana), “The Other Unfree Labour: Prison Work in Post-Emancipation British Guiana”
  2. Ale Pålsson (Uppsala University), “Labor ideology, incarceration and interimperial policing in post-emancipation Swedish St Barthélemy”
  3. Kiran Mehta (University of Leicester), “‘An Object of Fear’: Prison Labour and Colonial Violence in the nineteenth-century British Empire”
  4. Liz Egan (University of Warwick), “The Story of a West Indian Policeman: Writing race and justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Jamaican Constabulary Force”
  5. Jonathan Nash (College of Saint Benedict & Saint John’s University), “Unruly Confinement: Resistance and the Fragility of Incarceration in the Colonial Bahamas, 1950s-1970s”
10:30-10:45am     Coffee Break
10:45am-12:15pm     Panel 11: Power and Governance in the Caribbean: Institutions, Knowledge, and Control

Chair: Carla Gardina Pestana (University of California, Los Angeles)

  1. Kristen Block (University of Tennessee), “‘Evils… without remedy’: Transcultural Healers and the Public Good in the Early Colonial Administration of Bath in St. Thomas”
  2. Zakiya McKenzie (University of Bristol), “Lignum Vitae: Botanical Legacies of Maritime Expansion and Enslavement”
  3. Renee A. Nelson (University of the West Indies, Mona), “No good shutting the gate after the horse is out”: Jamaica and the Great Influenza Epidemic, 1918-1920”
  4. Loverne Jacobs-Browne (University of the Southern Caribbean), “Women of Vision: Gender, Faith, and the Early Development of the University of the Southern Caribbean, 1930s–1960s
12:15-1:45pm     Citizenship, Black Politics, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean

Chair: Kaysha Corinealdi (Rutgers University–New Brunswick)

  1. José Andrés Fernández Montes de Oca (Universidad de Costa Rica), “Land and Afro-Caribbean Legitimacy in the Costa Rican Caribbean (1870–1930s)”
  2. Philip A. Howard (University of Houston), ““The Lid Blows Off”: Reassessing the Labor Disturbances of Jamaica, 1936-1940””
  3. Willie Mack (University of Missouri), ““Les Noirs Americains, Un Peuple Frere,”: Haitian Exiles, US Black Power, and Global Subaltern Solidarity”
  4. Llana Barber (University of Minnesota), “Rebels and Refugees: Haitian Freedom in the Decolonizing Bahamas
  5. Anne’el Bain (University of West Indies, St Augustine), “The Eagle and the Caribbean Basin: US Cold War Military Manoeuvres- Resolutions, Reactions and Responses”
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 Jamaica.

Thursday, May 28

9:00-10:30am     Panel 13: Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Transformations in the Caribbean

Chair: Claudius Fergus (Independent Scholar)

  1. Clara Palmiste (Université des Antilles), “Administrative Purges in Martinique and Guadeloupe: from Joining the Free French Forces to Departmentalisation (1943–1947)”
  2. Marie-Christine Touchelay (IDHES-CNRS), “La loi de départementalisation et l’industrie sucrière en Guadeloupe (1946-1960)”*
  3. Claire Palmiste (Université de Guyane), “Juvenile Justice in French Guiana a Decade after Departmentalization”
  4. Jan Bant (Radboud University Nijmegen & University of Curaçao), ““Patriotism, Flag, Tourism”: Little League Baseball and National Identity Formation on Postcolonial Curaçao”
  5. Fiona Rajkumar and Rodney Rajkumar (University of the Southern Caribbean), “The Homeschooling Association of Trinidad and Tobago and Parental Resistance to Colonial Legacies in Education”

10:30-10:45am    Coffee Break

10:45am-12:15pm     Panel 14: Digital Humanities, Archives, and Public History in the Caribbean

Chair: Julian Cresser (The University of the West Indies, Mona)

  1. Diana Paton and Florian Wieser (University of Edinburgh), “Mapping Jamaican obeah prosecutions in the context of decriminalisation debates”
  2. Melissa Morris and Peter Walker (University of Wyoming), “Legacies of Codrington: A Digital Archive of Anglican Slavery”
  3. Thunnis van Oort & Jona Schlegel (Huygens Institute, the Netherlands), “A Reparative Digital Infrastructure for Suriname’s Past: Adapting the Time Machine Paradigm for a Postcolonial Context”
  4. David LaFevor (University of Texas at Arlington), “Tracing the End of the Slave Trade to Cuba: Archival Challenges, Opportunities, and Historiographies”
  5. Joseph F. Starr (Asilomar State Beach and Conference Grounds), “Preserving the Legacies of Slavery: Sustainable Management of Cultural Landscapes in Jamaica”
12:15-1:30pm    Lunch Break
1:30-3:00pm   Annual General Meeting
6:30-10:00pm     Dinner & Fête (Exact time and Location TBA)

Friday, May 29

Optional Field Trip: Details and Pricing TBA