Melanie J. Newton

Melanie J. Newton

First Name: 
Melanie J.
Last Name: 
Newton
Title: 
Professor and Graduate Associate Chair (She/Her)
Phone : 
416-978-8482
Office Location : 
Sidney Smith Hall, Room 2072, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3
Biography : 

For History Gradaute Associate Chair matters please send your email to history.gradac@utoronto.ca.

Melanie J. Newton is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where she teaches Caribbean and Atlantic World History. Her publications include The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Louisiana State University Press, 2008); “Returns to a Native Land? Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean” (Small Axe, vol. 41, July 2013, pp. 108-122) and “Counterpoints of Conquest: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Lesser Antilles and the Ethnocartography of Genocide,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 2, April 2022, 241-282.

At the University of Toronto, she has served in various administrative roles, including Director of the Caribbean Studies Program and Chair of the Faculty of Arts and Science Academic Appeals Board. She bgean a three-year term as Associate Chair (Graduate) of the Department of History at the University of Toronto in July 2022. From 1996-98 she served as youth representative on the Barbados Constitution Review Commission, which recommended that Barbados move from its status as a constitutional monarchy to a republic. The government of Barbados took up the commission's recommendation in 2021. She is co-chair of the City of Toronto's Community Advisory Committee on the renaming of Dundas St.
 

Education: 
DPhil, Oxford University
BA, McGill University

People Type:

Roles:

Research Area:

Areas of Interest: 

Histories of the Caribbean and the Atlantic World; slavery and emancipation; Indigenous and African diaspora; gender, social history, law.

Cross-Appointments: 
Centre for Caribbean Studies

Campus: