Teanu Reid '16
Teanu Reid '16
In progress, Ph.D. in History and African American Studies at Yale University.
In what ways do you feel your major in history helped to prepare you for graduate study and/or your current career?
I feel like the broad range of history courses that I had to take as a history major gave me a really good foundation for entering a history graduate program. Even though I didn’t have a master’s before starting my PhD, I’ve never felt like I’m less knowledgeable than my peers who have a master’s. It’s felt more like we all have different expertise in specific areas of history, and we bring those different backgrounds together in our current courses.
Are you engaged in historical research today?
Broadly, my research focuses on topics of migration, slavery, manumission, and money—particularly Spanish pieces of eight—in the early modern British Atlantic world. My research focuses on these topics as they relate to Barbados, and its relationship with other colonies.
More specifically, as part of my doctoral research, I am investigating what money enslaved and free people of color had access to in the British Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I question the possibilities for enslaved people to purchase their freedom. And, I seek to better understand sources of income for enslaved and free people of color, the economies they participated in, and how this affected the lives they were able to live.
My research thus far has been supported by MMUF (Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow) and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Are there any other reflections on your history major or time in the BC History Department that you’d like us to include in your spotlight?
One of the things I really appreciated about being a history major at BC was the mentorship and advisement that I got from faculty. I was well supported throughout my undergraduate experience and it’s an important aspect of how I got to where I am today.
