A Message from ITSS Postdoctoral Fellow Felicia Fricke
Felicia begins her keynote speech at the Reuvensdagen in Hoorn, the Netherlands, November 2023.
After more than three years at IN THE SAME SEA, I am very sorry to go! I joined the team in October 2021 and since then I have learned a lot from fantastic colleagues and collaborators – not least of these, how to be a historian. It was a steep learning curve coming into a new field, but in the end I think I have found my place somewhere between archaeology and history. Both fields have so much to offer the study of the Caribbean.
During my time at IN THE SAME SEA, I have managed the project website and social media, contributed to the Enslaved Fugitives in the Lesser Antilles database (which will soon be available online), written or co-written seven journal articles, contributed to two edited volumes, and co-edited a volume myself. I have helped to set up a new network for Caribbean and early career scholars in Caribbean archaeology and heritage studies (www.cocah.net) and I have served on the Board of the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology and as a member of the Statia Cultural Heritage Implementation Committee. I have attended several conferences (including the Dutch national archaeology conference in 2023, where I was the keynote speaker) and have organised public outreach events in Grenada and St. Barths. My work in this project has enabled me to expand my knowledge of the eastern Caribbean from the Dutch and French islands outwards – having now worked on both Swedish and British islands as well, I now feel like I have a much better understanding of the history of the region as a whole.
I am excited to see the final project outputs and I hope that we will have the opportunity to work together again in the future. And luckily, as I leave IN THE SAME SEA this April, I will not go very far. In fact, I will stay at the Saxo Institute as part of the DFF-funded research project Racialized Motherhood, PI Natália da Silva Perez (Erasmus University Rotterdam). I am keen to expand my skills in digital humanities in this new project and always to continue learning. Watch this space!
Felicia Fricke