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Professor Trevor Burnard

 

Biography

• Professor and Head of School, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, 2011-

• Professor of the History of the Americas, History and Comparative American Studies, University of Warwick, 2007-10; Head of Department, History, 2009-10

• Professor of American History and Head of Department, American Studies, University of Sussex, 2004-07

• Reader and Professor, History, Brunel University, 2000-04, Head of Department, Politics, American Studies and History, 2001-04

• Lecturer and Senior Lecturer, History, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 1990-99

• Lecturer, History, University of Waikato, New Zealand, 1989

• Lecturer, History, University of the West Indies at Mona, Kingston, Jamaica, 1987-89

Qualifications

• PhD, History, The Johns Hopkins University, 1988

• MA, History, The Johns Hopkins University, 1985,

• BA, History, University of Otago, New Zealand, 1983

Awards and Fellowships

• Mellon Foundation Grant to Warwick-Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies Collaboration  (co-applicant and organizer of one of four workshops) £291,114

• AHRC Network Grant for Early European American Studies Association, £47,000, 2008-10.

• Fellowship, Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, University of Virginia-Monticello, July 2009, $3000

• Archie K. Davis Fellowship, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, 2008-9 $50,000

• Leverhulme Award on merchants and merchandising in Kingston, Jamaica, 1745-1780 (with Kenneth Morgan), 2002-4 £66,000

• Fellowship, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, June-August 2002.

• Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, April-May, 1996.

• Transformation Fellow, Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, 1986-87

• Lovejoy Fellowship, The Johns Hopkins University, 1986-87

• Fulbright Travel Grant, 1983-88

• Commonwealth Scholarship, 1983

Editorial Membership and Professional Service

• President, European Early American Studies Association, 2007-10

• Editorial Boards, Slavery & Abolition; Journal of Early American History; Brill Series in Early American History

• The Oxford Online Bibliography in Atlantic History (editor and chief and author of four of 60 entries) (Oxford University Press: New York, 2010-)

• Review Committee, American Studies and European Studies Programmes, University of Dundee, March 2010

• Member, External Review Committee, Claremont McKenna History Department, March 2006

• AHRC Peer Review College, 2006-8

• Board Member, Centre for Imperial and Maritime Studies (CIMS),National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 2006-10

• External Examiner, BA and MA American Studies, University of Wales, Swansea, 2002-6; American History, BA, St. Andrews, 2003-7 and for Mlitt degrees, 2003-7; MA, University of Hull, 2008-; PhD, University of St Andrews, 2004; University of Canterbury, 2005; University of Manchester, 2006; University of Hull, 2008-10; MA, History, University of West Indies, Mona, 2004-5; PhD, Manchester and Warwick, 2006, Hull 2007; MA, University of Edinburgh, 2009-10; University of Nottingham, 2010.

Research

I am interested in the history of early British America, including the British West Indies, before ca. 1790 and in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Particular interests include slavery, social history and demography, imperialism, economic and business history, and gender. My work over the last decade has been especially concerned with identity in the New World in the eighteenth century and with how settler societies have been formed, or have failed to form in plantation societies in the Caribbean and the Chesapeake. In addition, I have been concerned with recreating the social and cultural world of slaves and masters in early Jamaica, using in particular the rich diaries of Thomas Thistlewood as a primary source.

My current projects are a monograph on early American historiography, a co-authored book comparing mid-eighteenth century Jamaica and Saint Domingue with John Garrigus of the University of Texas, Arlington, a social, demographic and economic history of white and black in Jamaica 1655-1780, and a historiographical study of the state of early American history in the twenty first century.

Publications

Books and Articles from 2001 onwards

Books

• Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 (Routledge: New York, 2002)
• Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (University of North Carolina Press and The Press University of the West Indies: Chapel Hill, London and Kingston, 2004). History Today Book of the Year, 2009.
• The Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture, 2010: Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period of British Abolitionism (Department of History and Archaeology, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 2010). 155683
• The Routledge History of Slavery (with Gad Heuman) (Routledge: London and New York, October, 2010) 155684
• Hearing Slave Voices: Slave Testimony from Berbice (Guyana Classics Series: Georgetown, 2010) 155687

Forthcoming Books

• Tropical Transformations: St Domingue, Jamaica, and the making of Racial Order, 1748-1791 (with John Garrigus)
• Expanding the Boundaries: The Practice and Politics of Writing Early American History in the Twenty First Century

Articles and Book Chapters

• "A Crucible of Modernity: Kingston, Jamaica, and its Black Inhabitants, 1745-1780," in Matt Childs, James Sidbury and Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, eds. The Black Urban Atlantic (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, forthcoming).
• "Harvest Years: Reconfigurations of Empire in Jamaica during and after the Seven Years' War," Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History (under consideration).
• "From Periphery to Periphery: The Pennants' Jamaican Plantations, 1771-1812 and Industrialization in North Wales," in H.V. Bowen, ed., Wales and Empire, 1607-1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).
• "Placing British Settlement in the Americas in Comparative Perspective," in H.V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid, eds., British Asia and the British Atlantic, 1500-1820: Two Worlds or One? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• "'A Compound Mongrel Mixture': Racially Coded Humor, Satire, and the Denigration of White Creoles in the British West Indies, 1780-1834," in Elizabeth Mansfield and Kelly Malone, eds., Seeing Satire (Oxford: Voltaire Press, 2011)
• Editor, "Special Issue: The French Atlantic World," with Allan Potofsky, University of Paris VII, French History April 2011.
• "America the Good, America the Brave, America the Free: Reviewing the Oxford History of the United States," Journal of American Studies, April 2011
• "Towards a Social and Cultural History of Keywords and Concepts by the Early Modern Research Group," History of Political Thought XXXI (Autumn, 2010), 427-48 (main author Mark Knights: I was part of a consortium of contributing writers).
• "'Impatient of Sub-Ordination and Liable to Sudden Transports of Anger': White Masculinity and Homosocial Relations with Black Men in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica," in Thomas S. Foster, ed., New Men: Manliness in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2010) 155689
• "White West Indian Identity in the Eighteenth Century," in John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris, eds., Assumed Identities: Race and the National Imagination in the Atlantic World (College Station, Tx: Texas A & M Press, 2010)
• "Collecting and Accounting: Representing Slaves as Commodities in Jamaica, 1674-1784," in Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall, eds., Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2010)
• "British West Indies and Bermuda," in Mark M. Smith and Robert L. Paquette, eds., Oxford Handbook of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 135-53
• "The Atlantic Slave Trade," in Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard, eds., The Routledge History of Slavery (Routledge: London, 2010)
• "The Planter Class," in Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard, eds., The Routledge History of Slavery (Routledge: London, 2010)
• "Jamaica as America, America as Jamaica: Hauntings in Vincent Brown's The Reaper's Garden," Small Axe, 31 (2010), 200-11
• The British Atlantic World," in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• "A Passion for Places; The Geographical Turn in Early American History," Commonplace, 8, 4 (July 2008), www.commonplace-org
• "The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Ethnicities in Seventeenth Century Jamaica," in David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony J. Tibbles, eds., Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2007), 139-64.
• Where the Boy's aren't: Women as Reluctant Migrants but Rational Actors in Early America," (with Ann Little) in Jay Kleinberg ed., The Practice of U.S. Womens History (Rutgers University Press, 2007).
• "Only Connect: The Rise and Rise (and Fall?) of Atlantic History," Historically Speaking, VII (5), (2007), 10-11.
• "'Rioting in Goatish Embraces: Marriage and Improvement in Early British Jamaica, 1660-1780," The History of the Family, 12, 1 (2007). 
• "Empire Matters? The historiography of imperialism in early America, 1492-1830," History of European Ideas, 33, 1 (2007), 87-107.
• "Evaluating Gender in Early Jamaica, 1674-1784," The History of the Family, 12, 2 (2007), 81-91.
• "Goodbye, Equaino, the African" Historically Speaking, VII, 3 (2006), 10-11.
• "'Gay and Agreeable Ladies': White Women in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica," Wadabagei, 9, 3 (2006), 27-49.
• "The Price of Success: Tolerating a Failed Planter Patriarch," The Australasian Journal of American Studies, 24, 1 (July 2005), 63-68.
• "The Founding Fathers in Early American Historiography: A View from Abroad," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser. LXII (2005), 745-64.
• "'Passengers Only:' The Extent and Significance of Absenteeism in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica," Atlantic Studies, 1, 2 (2004), 178-195.
• "Freedom, Migration and the Negative Example of the American Revolution: The Changing Status of Unfree Labor in the Second British Empire and the New American Republic," in Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, December 2004), 295-314.
• "'Do Thou in Gentle Phibia Smile': Scenes from an Interracial Marriage, Jamaica, 1754-1786," in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene C. Hine, eds., Free Women of Color in the Americas (University of Illinois Press, 2004).
• "The Dog That Did not Bark:  Periodisation in Early American History," Uncommon Sense, Fall 2004.
• "Thomas Thistlewood; Sir Thomas Lynch," Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
• "Hearing Slave Voices: The Fiscal's Reports of Berbice and Demerara-Essequebo," (with John Lean) Archives 27, no. 106 (2002), 37-50  155690 TBA.
• "'The Grand Mart of the Island': Kingston, Jamaica in the mid-eighteenth century and the Question of Urbanisation in Plantation Societies," in Kathleen Monteith and Glen Richards, eds., Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture (University of West Indies Press: Kingston, 2002).
• "Not a Place for Whites? Demographic Failure and Settlement in Comparative Context, Jamaica, 1655-1780," in Kathleen Monteith and Glen Richards, eds., Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture (University of West Indies Press: Kingston, 2002). 
• "'A Matron in Rank, a Prostitute in Manners ...': The Manning Divorce of 1741 and Class, Race, Gender, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica," in Verene Shepherd, ed., Working Out Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora (St Martin's Press: London, 2002).
• "The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655-1788," (with Kenneth Morgan), William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., LVIII (January, 2001), 205-228.
• "E Pluribus Plures: Ethnicities in Early Jamaica," Jamaican Historical Review XXI (2001), 8-22, 56-59.
• "'A Prodigious Mine': The Wealth of Jamaica Before the American Revolution Once Again," Economic History Review, LIV, 3 (August, 2001), 505-23.
• "Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXI:3 (Winter, 2001), 325-46.

Selected Other

• Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture, University of West Indies, Mona, Kingston, March 2010
• Seminar Leader, NEH Summer Seminar, July 2009, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
• Invited speaker, 2007 Webb Lecture Series, University of Texas-Arlington, March 2007.
• Subject Co-ordinator, British Empire to 1780, Institute of Historical Research Annual Bibliography, 2003-
• Invited Chair, Harvard-Cambridge Atlantic History Seminar, Cambridge, 2004.
• Invited participant, Omohundro Institute of Early American History Needs and Opportunities Symposium on Caribbean History, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, Winter, 2003.
• Featured Consultant, Channel 4 series on Forbidden Fruit: A History of Interracial Relations, screening in November, 2003; Featured Consultant, "Who Do you Think You are?" BBC 2009.

Teaching 2011

• HIST10005 The Age of Revolutions: America and France (with Peter McPhee)
• HIST30059 Race in America
• HIST40030 History for Historians (with David Goodman)
• HIST30060 Making History (capstone)

Research Supervision

I am interested in supervising students in the following broad areas: early modern British history; colonial and antebellum America; Caribbean history. I am also interested in supervising students with broad interests in social, cultural, economic and demographic history for the period before the mid nineteenth century.

 

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