Greetings!
I am a historian of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, with a particular focus on the British Caribbean. I am interested in Orisha worship and the global history of the African kola nut.
I completed my PhD at SOAS, University of London, in 2017. I am currently Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow.
My current book project, “The 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 was Orisha worship—a combination of dance, music, healing, divination, animal sacrifice, spirit possession, and feasts—which originated among the Yoruba people of western Africa. Over time, this practice became known as “African work” in Grenada. My book provides a new way of interpreting African work in Grenada, arguing that rather than being a survival of a homogenous group of liberated Yoruba, it has been recreated through exchanges within the island, the wider Eastern Caribbean, as well as across the Atlantic world.
I am also working on a global history of the kola nut which examines the production, trade, and consumption of the nut in western Africa, Europe, North America, and the circum-Caribbean region.