Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Cross-Appointments
Fields of Study
- Atlantic World
- Conflict, Violence and Genocide
- 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 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
Awards
- 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)
- “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)
- "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)
- The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Louisiana State University Press : 2008)
- “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)