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About Me

I am currently completing my second book manuscript which examines the interracial family born to wealthy planter John Peers in seventeenth-century Barbados. Provisionally entitled, Next of Kin: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery, this project traces the lives of five women with whom John fathered children (including two English wives, two enslaved women, and a white servant woman), his eighteen offspring (enslaved and free), and their descendants. Mining legal records, deeds, wills, plantation registers, estate inventories, shipping logs and ecclesiastical documents from England and the Caribbean, Next of Kin reveals how the forces of empire shaped the lives of the women and their children, and how in turn the women and children navigated racial and gendered hierarchies in both Barbados and London. By making connections between micro-level familial relationships and the macro-level political machinations of empire, Next of Kin demonstrates the ways that family, patriarchy, and the rise of racial slavery built the early modern English world.

Recent Publications

Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, Early American Places Series, 2013).

“In the Name of the Mother: The Story of Susannah Mingo, a Woman of Color in the Early English Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 77 (2020): 177-210. (Winner of the 2020 Lester J. Cappon Prize awarded annually by the Omohundro Institute for the best article published in the WMQ.)

“Birth and Initiation on the Peers Plantation: The Problem of Creolization in Seventeenth-Century Barbados” Slavery and Abolition, vol. 39 (2018): 290-314.

“Plantation Life in the British West Indies, 1650-1850” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, Sue Juster, ed., September 2020).

“The Early English Caribbean: Conflict, the Census, and Control,” in The World of Colonial America: An Atlantic Handbook, ed. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz (New York and London: Routledge, 2017).

with Kristen Block, “Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean,” Past and Present, no. 210 (Feb 2011): 33-60.

Media Coverage

Twitter

@ProfJennyShaw

Country Focus

Barbados; Anglophone Caribbean; England

Expertise by Geography

Atlantic, Caribbean, England, North America

Expertise by Chronology

2, 3, 4, 6

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Family, Labor, Migration & Immigration, Race, Sexual Violence, Slavery, Women