Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Atlantic World, slavery, medicine, sorcery, poison, eighteenth century, West Central Africa, Caribbean, Brazil

About Me: I am an Assistant Professor at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. I received my PhD at Georgetown University, and my BA from Brown University. My research in my book manuscript, “Poisoned Relations: Medicine, Sorcery, and Poison Trials in the Contested Atlantic, 1680-1850” explores the movement and interaction between ideas about affliction and medical care in the context of slave societies in the western Atlantic (particularly Bahia, Suriname, Martinique, and Virginia). In my research I also explore the possibilities and uses of historical linguistics for Atlantic history, especially for conducting histories of ideas in Atlantic Africa. At Randolph, I teach courses on the “Atlantic World,” “Atlantic Africa,” and “Witches, Healers, and Diviners.”

Recent Publications: Dissertation: “Poisoned Relations: Medicine, Sorcery, and Poison Trials in the Contested Atlantic, 1680-1850” (2019)

Book Chapters

Berry, Chelsea. “Poisoned Relations: Medical Choices and Poison Accusations within Enslaved Communities.” In Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery, edited by Christopher Willoughby and Sean Smith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. (Forthcoming).

Berry, Chelsea. “Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge as Cultural Capital in the Greater Caribbean.” In Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World: Objects and Capital in the Transatlantic Imagination, edited by Victoria Barnett Woods. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. (Forthcoming).

Book Reviews

Berry, Chelsea. Review of Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society, by Cécile Vidal. Louisiana History. (Forthcoming).

Berry, Chelsea. Review of Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire, by Suman Seth. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 75, no. 1 (January 2020): 109-112.