Early Caribbean Society

The Early Caribbean Society is a space for sharing, developing and foregrounding scholarship, research, writing and creative responses to the literature, history, and culture of the Caribbean region from the period of the earliest written records until the era of emancipation. ECS is a forum open to scholars of all nations and disciplines committed to ensuring that the importance of the early Caribbean to global history and culture is remembered. We are an antiracist, anticolonial organization that includes and stands in solidarity with Indigenous and colonized peoples.

Kerry Sinanan, President

Dr. Kerry Sinanan is Assistant Professor in Global pre-1800 literature at the University of Winnpeg.

She specializes in the Black Atlantic, Caribbean slavery and race, and the global dimensions of Black resistance and abolition up to the present.

Désha Osborne, Vice-President

Dr. Désha Amelia Osborne is a Chancellor’s Fellow Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. The daughter of Vincentian immigrants, she is a scholar of Caribbean and transatlantic literary history, and her teaching and research are focused on colonialism, slavery, and the migrations of people, culture, and ideas.  Désha is currently completing a monograph study of Scottish settlers and enslavers in the island of St Vincent during the 18^th and early 19^th century who were collectively responsible for reconstructing the landscape, culture and historical imagination of the island during this period. The research also works to uncover the lives of Black and mixed-heritage women and their children enslaved by these Scots.

Désha has held research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Special Collections Library in the University of Aberdeen, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Désha previously taught literature in the Department of English and Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. She completed her PhD in English at the University of Cambridge where her research was a full-length study of the poem Hiroona: an Historical Romance in Poetic Form, published with the University of the West Indies Press.

Alexandra L. Milsom, Secretary/Treasurer

Dr. Alexandra Lauren Milsom is an Assistant Professor of English at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College (CUNY), located in the South Bronx. Her research interests include guidebook history, early Caribbean tourism, the Grand Tour, and representations of religion and race in travel literature. Her first book tracks the development of the guidebook genre alongside Catholic Emancipation in Great Britain and Ireland during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century. In recent years, she has published in the Keats-Shelley Journal, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and Studies in Romanticism as well as for Inside Higher Ed and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Cassander L. Smith, Immediate Past President

Dr. Smith is an associate professor of English and associate dean for academic affairs in the Honors College at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Her teaching and research focus on representations of black Africans in early Atlantic literature, emphasizing the racial/cultural ideologies that helped shape English encounters with the early Americas and helped shape the literature produced about those encounters.

She is the author of Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic (forthcoming LSU Press, September 2023) and Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (LSU Press, December 2016). She also has co-edited two volumes of essays: Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) and Teaching With Tension: Race, Reality, and Resistance in the Classroom (Northwestern University Press, 2019). In addition, she serves as the associate editor for Cambridge University Press’s 19-volume series African American Literature in Transition, which addresses transformations and continuities in African American literature from its origins to the present. Her current work in progress is a monograph, Race and Respectability in Early Black Atlantic Literature. The book examines the ways in which issues of race, class, and morality merge in the emancipation rhetoric of an early modern black Atlantic.