My book “Yoruba Are on A Rock”: Recaptured Africans and the Orisas of Grenada (under contract with Cambridge University Press), focuses on the 2,700 recaptives who were sent to Grenada between 1836 and 1863. One of their key cultural legacies is Orisa worship—a combination of dance, music, healing, divination, animal sacrifice, and feasts—which originated among the Yoruba people of western Africa. 

I argue that Grenada’s Orisa religion reflects a dynamic and multi-layered confluence of local, regional, and global historical processes arcing across the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Rather than reduce the history of Orisa religion in Grenada to a chronologically flattened, unidirectional "African survival" narrative, my book traces the complex movements of people and ideas between various points in western Africa and the eastern Caribbean. 

I am also working on a global history of the African kola nut. The aim of my project is to foreground the role of Africans in the production, distribution, and consumption of the kola nut. I chart the history and influence of the plant in Africa, the circum-Caribbean, Europe, and North America between 1500 and 1900, and use this investigation of the kola nut as a case study to highlight and explain the long-neglected role of Africans as distributors and consumers of global commodities. 

I am PI for ‘Transforming Public Understanding of Grenada's African Religious Heritage’ (Jun-Dec 2024), funded by UoG’s AHRC Impact Acceleration (IAA) grant. Partnering with the Grenada National Trust and cultural collective Shrine of the Seven Wonders of Africa Inc., this project raises awareness of African religions to inform education curricula, legislative reform, and government policy.

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2019 Library Fellowship, The John Carter Brown Library, Brown University

2019 Post-Doctoral Fellowship, The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University

I am interested in supervising doctoral projects on slavery and post-slavery Caribbean societies, African diaspora cultures, and commodities in the Atlantic world.

• Carty, Taylar
  More Than My Mother's Daughter: Centring Black Girlhood in Barbados, 1750-1838
• Finlayson, Eilidh
  Gendering Scottish-Atlantic Slavery: property rights, kinship, and the female beneficiaries of transatlantic wealth, 1770-1838