As the first Bolin Scholar to earn a regular faculty appointment and tenure, you have both studied history and made it. Having grown up on the campus of the University of the West Indies, your first interest was in Caribbean history. There being little support for that work in U.S. graduate schools, you focused instead on early and modern Europe, with an emphasis on the French Revolution. Your dissertation and early work explored police archives and illegal publications to uncover the existence of a stronger, and more radical, opposition to the monarchy than usually had been depicted. At Williams you were able to return to your first loves—teaching and writing on the Haitian Revolution and comparative colonialism, along with the importance of gender, race, ethnicity, and religion in the evolution of modern European consciousness. You were the first faculty sponsor for our group Students of Caribbean Ancestry. You faithfully supported students of all kinds as they rallied to speak truth to power, far away and here at home. You have compiled an Oral History of Blacks in Berkshire County and have served as a leader of the group Historians for Peace and Democracy. In all this you have enlarged upon the example of your early heroes, C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney, as models of the Caribbean intellectual activist.
I hereby declare you Professor of History and Africana Studies, Emerita, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 2, 2019
Megamenu Social