New College – University of Toronto

Caribbean Studies Advisory Board

Member Biographies:

Jacqui Alexander

Coming soon.

Gage Averill

Professor (History and Culture), Dean (Faculty of Music) and Graduate Chair
G.A. (Washington), Ph.D. (Washington)

email: dean.music@utoronto.ca

Gage Averill (Ph.D. 1989, University of Washington) is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the popular music of the Caribbean. Formerly Chair of the Music Department at NYU, Professor Averill has also taught at Columbia University, Wesleyan University and as a visiting professor at Princeton. His book A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti(University of Chicago Press, 1997) won the Association of Recorded Sound Collections Award for Best Research in the Field of Recorded Folk and Ethnic Music, 1998, and his second monograph,Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony, was named an “Outstanding Academic Title for 2004″ by Choice, the review magazine of the American Library Association and was awarded the 2004 Alan P. Merriam Prize recognizing the most distinguished, published English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology and the Irving Lowens Award for Best Book from the Society for American Music. He is also an editor of Making and Selling Culture (with Richard Ohmann et al, Wesleyan University Press, 1996). His shorter publications have appeared in edited volumes, journals, textbooks, and encyclopedias.

Professor Averill has consulted for the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, the National Endowment for the Arts (US), and for various films, festivals, archives, media programs, and copyright law cases. A percussionist and free reed player, he has performed with steelbands, Afro-Cuban ensembles, Afro pop, and Irish ensembles. His research interests include the relationship of music to power, the cultural geography of music (including globalization), and issues of emotion, memory, and nostalgia in music.  He has written recently on applied and public ethnomusicology, world music ensembles, the scholarly projects of Alan Lomax, music and militarism, and on music in peace and conflict.  He is currently editing a 12-CD series from the 1936-37 recordings in Haiti by Alan Lomax.

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Mark V. Campbell

Ph.D. Candidate

Mark V. Campbell is a PhD candidate in the Sociology and Equity Studies Department at OISE/UT.  His research interests include; remix culture, turntablism, Afrodiasporic youth cultures, subjugated knowledges, the TransCaribbean, AfroModernism(s), temporality and Canadian state-sponsored ‘multiculturalism’. His most recent publications include; “Indigenous Knowledge in Jamaica: A Tool of  Ideology in a Neo-Colonial Context” in Anticolonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance(eds.)G. Dei & A. Kempf (2006) and “The Mixology of Diasporic Caribbeans in Canada” in Ebony Roots, Northern Soil (ed.) Charmaine Nelson (2007). His dissertation is entitled: “Remixing Relationality: Afrodiasporic Youth Practices of Negotiating Difference”.

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J. Edward Chamberlin

Professor

J. Edward Chamberlin was born in Vancouver, and educated at the universities of British Columbia, Oxford and Toronto. Since 1970, he has been on the faculty of the University of Toronto, where he is now University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He has been Senior Research Associate with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in Canada and Poetry Editor of Saturday Night, and has worked extensively on native land claims in Canada, the United States, Africa and Australia. His books include The Harrowing of Eden: White Attitudes Towards Native Americans (1975), Ripe Was the Drowsy Hour: The Age of Oscar Wilde (1977), Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (1993), If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground (2003), and Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations, published in 2006 by Knopf.

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Ramabai Espinet

Sessional Lecturer II

email:ramabai.espinet@senecac.on.ca

Professor Espinet is an academic, a writer, and a critic. At present, she is a Professor of English at Seneca College in Toronto. She also teaches Post- Colonial Literature and Women’s Studies at the University of Toronto and is a Fellow of CERLAC (Centre for Research in Latin America and the Caribbean) at York University.

Her published works include the collection of poetry Nuclear Seasons (1991), the children’s booksThe Princess of Spadina (1992) and Ninja’s Carnival (1993) as well as short fiction and poetry published in anthologies such as Her Mother’s Ashes, Aurat Durbar, Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam,Another Way to Dance and Wheel and Come Again. She has edited Creation Fire, an anthology of Caribbean women’s poetry in several languages, containing the work of 121 poets. Her poetry/performance piece, Indian Robber Talk, has been staged in Toronto at several festivals including Desh Pardesh, Caribana and Rhythms of India 1993, and is featured on the video “Caribbean Women Writers,” produced by Wellesley College. Her poem, “Shay’s Robber Talk,” is published as the afterword to the 2nd edition of Looking White People in the Eye by Sherene Razack. Her preface to Yvonne Bobb-Smith’s work, I Know Who I Am, includes a long poem entitled “Praisesong for Miz Bobb.”

Her field of research is Post-Colonial Literature and her interests range from popular culture especially calypso, chutney and the Carnivalesque aesthetic to the development of scholarship on the Indian diaspora. Her essays on these subjects have been published in Indenture and Exile, edited by Dr. Frank Birbalsingh; The Other Woman, edited by Makeda Silvera; and in World Literature Written in English, for example. She has been a calypso judge in Toronto for the past three years of Caribana competitions. She has worked with a women’s collective to write and produce the play, Beyond the Kala Pani, which deals with Indian women and indentureship in the Caribbean. This play was performed at several festivals including WOMAD 92. Between the years 1992- 1996 she wrote a bi-weekly column, “Focus on Women,” for the community newspaper,Indo-Caribbean World; she now writes an occasional column.

Her recent novel, The Swinging Bridge, was published in July 2003 by HarperFlamingo. The paperback, a Harper Perennial, was released in July 2004. The 1-hour documentary film, Coming Home (2005), focuses on a return trip to Trinidad to launch The Swinging Bridge. The film was directed by Frances Anne Solomon and produced by Leda Serene Films/Caribbean Tales.

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Rick Halpern

Professor, New College Principal
Ph.D. Pennsylvania (US)

email: nc.principal@utoronto.ca

Rick Halpern is the Bissell-Heyd Chair of American Studies and former Director of the Centre for the Study of the United States; he is now serving as Principal of New College.  His research interests focus on race and labour in a number of national and transnational contexts.  Currently he is at work on a comparative study of migrant and racialized labour in the sugar industries of Louisiana and Natal, South Africa.  His recent publications include Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-1954 (1997); Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA, and Africa (2000); The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History (2002); and Slavery and Emancipation(2002).  He has published articles in a number of journals including the Journal of American History, Social History, Labor History, the Journal of Southern African Studies, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He supervises students working on a range of topics in African American history, US social history, and transnational labour and working class history.

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Horace Henriques

Coming Soon

Arnold Itwaru

Coming Soon

Kenneth Mills

Professor (History), Director (Latin American Studies at U of T)
D.Phil. Oxford (LA)

email: ken.mills@utoronto.ca

Professor Mills is a historian of colonial Latin America whose research and teaching
engages with the late medieval and early modern Spanish world. Principal interests
include the social and anthropological history of religion and cultural dynamism,
Catholic Christian evangelisation and its aftermaths, and interactive indigenous
responses and histories. He is the author of Idolatry and Its Enemies (1997) and An
Evil Lost to View? (1994). He has prepared a sourcebook of primary texts and visual
images, Colonial Latin America:  A Documentary History (2002), with William B. Taylor and Sandra Lauderdale Graham.  Recent work includes Conversion: Old Worlds and New, andConversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (both 2003) co-edited with Anthony Grafton, his Idolatry and Its Enemies (1997). Kenneth Mills is writing a book around the journey of Castilian alms-collector and image-maker, Diego de Ocaña (c. 1570-1608).

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Melanie Newton

Assistant Professor
D.Phil. Oxford

email: melanie.newton@utoronto.ca

Professor’s Newton’s research specialisation is the social history of slave emancipation in the Caribbean and the Atlantic World.  She has taught and supervised courses on Caribbean history since 1492, slavery, abolition and their aftermath in Atlantic World societies. Her selected publications include, The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation, 1790-1860 (Louisiana State University Press, in press); “The King v. Robert James, a Slave, for Rape: Inequality, Gender and British Slave Emancipation, 1823-1833”,Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 43(3), July 2005, pp. 582-610; “Philanthropy, Gender and the Production of Public Life in Barbados, c1790-c1850”, in Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (eds.), Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World  (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press), pp. 225-246.

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Néstor E. Rodríguez

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Emory

email: nestor.rodriguez@utoronto.ca

Professor Rodríguez was born in La Romana, Dominican Republic, and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras), and a Ph.D. from Emory University in Latin American Literature. He is the author of Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana (México: Siglo XXI, 2005), La isla y su envés (Puerto Rico: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2003), and the poetry volume Animal pedestre (Puerto Rico: Terranova, 2004). His essays and articles have appeared in journals such as Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista Iberoamericana, and La Torre, as well as inLa Jornada (México), El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico), Hoy (Dominican Republic), and Claridad (Puerto Rico).

Online CV: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~nrodrig

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Sara Salih

Assistant Professor
B.A, D.Phil Oxford

email: sara.salih@utoronto.ca

Sara Salih is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto.  Her teaching and research interests are in the fields of Caribbean literature, eighteenth-century literature (especially early black writing and women’s prose fiction), and postcolonial theory and writing.  Her publications include: The History of Mary Prince (ed., Penguin, 2000), Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (ed., Penguin 2005), Judith Butler (Routledge Critical Thinkers 2002), The Judith Butler Reader (ed., with Judith Butler, Blackwell, 2004), Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760-1838 (co-edited with Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), “The Silence of Miss Lambe: Fictions of ‘Race’ in the Abolition Era” (Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2006; Wasafiri special issue forthcoming in 2007), “‘A Gallant Heart to the Empire’: Autoethnography and Imperial Identity in Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures… in Many Lands” (forthcoming in Philological Quarterly), and “Putting Down Rebellion: Witnessing the Body of the Condemned in Abolition-Era Narratives” (forthcoming in Essays and Studies, 2007).  She is currently working on a book about representations of “brown” women in England and Jamaica from the eighteenth century to the present day (to be published by Routledge), and co-editing a special issue of ARIEL on slavery and abolition (forthcoming, 2007).

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Alexie Tcheuyap

Associate Professor

email: alexie.tcheuyap@utoronto.ca

Alexie Tcheuyap is Associate Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French at the University of Toronto. He has published Esthétique et folie dans l’œuvre romanesque de pius Ngandu Nkashama (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), Cinema and Social Discourse in Cameroon(Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2005) and De l’écrit à l’écran. Les réécritures filmiques du roman africain francophone (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2005). He has also authored several articles and edited journal issues on literary theory, francophone literatures and films.

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D. Alissa Trotz

Director, Assistant Professor

email: da.trotz@utoronto.ca

D. Alissa Trotz, Associate Professor in Women & Gender Studies and Sociology & Equity Studies (OISE/UT), was appointed Director of the Caribbean Studies Program in July 2006. Her research explores how the questions that emerge from the incredibly complex site of colonial encounter that comprises the Caribbean, can provide analytical tools for thinking about such issues as difference, resistance, nationalism, diasporic practices, feminism and transnationality. Her publications include Gender, Ethnicity and Place: Women and Identities in Guyana (with Linda Peake, Routledge 1999), and articles on historicizing the Caribbean family, race, gender and nation and the Caribbean diaspora in such journals as Small Axe, New West Indian Guide, Social and Economic Studies, Global Networks. She is guest-editing, with Aaron Kamugisha, a special issue ofRace and Class to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade, and is working on a co-edited collection, Only the Bitter Come: The Transcultural Caribbean, with Holger Henke and Karl Heinz-Magister. Professor Trotz is associate editor of the journal Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and its Diaspora. She currently has a SSHRC Grant to look at the reconfiguration of feminist activism in the neoliberal Caribbean.

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Amar Wahab

Sessional Lecturer

email: amar.wahab@utoronto.ca

Amar Wahab holds a PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies from the University of Toronto. He is currently a sessional lecturer at New College, University of Toronto teaching a course on ‘Indenture, Survival and Change’. He holds a visiting SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, United Kingdom where he is doing research on literary and visual representations of Indo-Caribbean identity. Dr. Wahab has taught general courses in sociology and Caribbean Studies, as well as special topics related to Caribbean families and cultural traditions in the Caribbean at Ryerson University. His research focuses on the cultural politics of Indo-Caribbean identity in the region and the Diaspora. He is currently co-editing a diary found on the first shipment of Indian indentured labourers to the Caribbean with Professors David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo and is working on a manuscript entitled “Inventing Trinidad: Race, Gender and Representation in the Nineteenth Century”.

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