Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Cross-Appointments
Fields of Study
- Atlantic World
- Conflict, Violence and Genocide
- Cultural and Intellectual
- Empires, Colonialisms and Indigeneity
- Gender, Sex, and Sexualities
- Latin America and Caribbean
- Migration/Diaspora
- Social
- State, Politics, and Law
Areas of Interest
Histories of the Caribbean and the Atlantic World; slavery and emancipation; Indigenous and African diaspora; gender, social history, law.
Biography
For History Graduate matters please send your email to history.tricampus@utoronto.ca.
Melanie J. Newton is 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, Chair of the Faculty of Arts and Science Academic Appeals Board and Associate Chair (Graduate) of the Department of History from 2022-2024. She is currently the Tricampus Graduate Chair for the Department of History (2024-2029). 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 served as co-chair of the City of Toronto's Community Advisory Committee on the renaming of Dundas St and Yonge-Dundas Square.
Education
Awards
- 2023 Lester J. Cappon Prize Omohundro Institute (OI)
- 2023 Milner Memorial Award Canadian Associate of University Teachers
- 2016 Outstanding Teaching Award Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto
Publications
- “Counterpoints of Conquest: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Lesser Antilles and the Ethnocartography of Genocide” ( : 2022)
- “‘The Quintessential Caribbean People’: The Garifuna of St. Vincent and the Grenadines… and the World” (The Art Gallery of Ontario and Delmonico Books : 2022)
- “Henry Dundas: Naming Empire and Genocide" ( : 2020)
- “The Haunting of Slavery: Colonialism and the Disabled Body in the Caribbean” (New York: Springer Publishing Company : 2016)
- “Gender” (Princeton University Press : 2015)
- "The Race Leapt At Sauteurs: Genocide, Narrative and Indigenous Exile from the Caribbean” (Taylor & Francis Online : 2014)
- “Returns to a Native Land?’ Indigeneity and Decolonisation in the Anglophone Caribbean” ( : 2013)
- “Freedom’s Prisons: Incarceration, Emancipation and Modernity in No Bond but the Law” (Duke University Press : 2011)
- “Journeys of Wonder and Rage: Lucille Mathurin Mair and the Politics of History” ( : 2010)
- The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Louisiana State University Press : 2008)
- “The Road through Africa: Imperial Nationalism and Diasporic Racial Consciousness in Post-Slavery Barbados" (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan : 2007)
- “Race for Power: People of Colour and the Politics of Liberation in Barbados, c1800-c1850” (London and Oxford: MacMillan Caribbean : 2005)
- “The King v. Robert James, a Slave, for Rape: Inequality, Gender and British Slave Emancipation, 1823-1833” ( : 2005)
- “Philanthropy, Gender and the Production of Public Life in Barbados, c1790-c1850” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press : 2005)
- “'New Ideas of Correctness’: Gender, Amelioration and Emancipation in Barbados, 1810s-1850s” ( : 2000)
- Special focus on “Caribbean Historiography” ()