Overview
I am a historian of early America and the Caribbean, with particular interests in human trafficking, colonization, and illicit economies over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In my research and my teaching, I am interested in tracing individuals who crossed imperial boundaries—by choice and by coercion—in order to understand how processes like colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and trade functioned in the interstices of early modern empires.
My first book, titled The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking, Colonization, and Trade in the Greater Caribbean, 1570-1670 is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press. In the book, I analyze the century before the height of the sugar plantation complex in the Caribbean in order to trace how early modern racialized slavery emerged through practices of captive-taking and human trafficking in Caribbean spaces where European metropolitan officials had almost no control but where England and France would establish their first official colonies. The Predatory Sea offers the first full-length study of the deeply entangled histories of captivity and colonialism in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Caribbean.
Research Focus
Early America, Atlantic world, Caribbean, colonialism, slavery, and trade.
Publications
The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking, Colonization, and Trade in the Greater Caribbean, 1530-1690 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).
"'Betwixt Ye Two Rivers': Trafficking and Colonization in Early Seventeenth-Century St. Christopher," Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 103, no. 2 (May, 2023): 283-312.
"'Brought from the Palenques': Race, Subjecthood, and Warfare in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean," Early American Studies, Vol. 20, no. 4 (Fall, 2022): 695-713.
“Centering Spanish Jamaica: Regional Competition, Informal Trade, and the English Invasion, 1620-1662,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 76, no. 4 (October, 2019): 1-30.
“Pirates, Planting, and the Rights of Mankind in Seventeenth-Century Tortuga,” The Latin Americanist, Vol. 61, No. 4 (December, 2017): 584-99.
“Virtue in Corruption: Privateers, Smugglers, and the Shape of Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” Early American Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter, 2015): 80-110.
In the news
- Twenty Affinito-Stewart research grants awarded for the 2022-2023 academic year
- Center for Social Sciences awards 2022-23 Faculty Fellowships
HIST Courses - Fall 2024
- HIST 1985 : American History from 1500 to 1800
- HIST 2001 : Supervised Reading - Undergraduate
- HIST 2055 : Race and Slavery in the Early Atlantic World
- HIST 3002 : Supervised Research - Undergraduate
- HIST 8004 : Supervised Reading