Associate Professor, History I am a historian of Early Modern France, the Atlantic World, and the Caribbean. I teach courses about Europe, the Atlantic world, women and gender, race, and pirates. In my classes I emphasize active and cooperative learning and intellectual engagement; you should expect conversation in small and large groups, group projects, and lots of active learning. While I do sometimes lecture, lectures do not comprise the bulk of my classes. I find that when I help students to reach their own conclusions, rather than telling them in advance what their conclusions should be, they learn both the subject matter of the class and important analysis skills. And history is all about analysis! My first book, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic, follows the stories of people who built families and fortunes on both sides of the French Atlantic. By focusing on family and household, the units that anchored France in the eighteenth century, I show interconnections among race, gender, colonialism, and the plantation system in the early modern period. My current project, “Possession: Race, Gender, and Property in the French Caribbean,” argues that property ownership emerged in the context of the growth of the plantation system as a white male privilege. I examine the ways women, especially women of color, exerted control over property, and how those opportunities were taken away. I have also published on representations of gender and race.
