A Message from ITSS Postdoctoral Fellow Heather Freund
Photo of me presenting at the Association of Caribbean Historians conference in Santa Marta, Colombia, May 2024.
I am bidding a fond farewell to In the Same Sea after more than three years. I joined the team in September 2021 and have been a part of many exciting things on the project. I am proud to have helped build the database of enslaved fugitives that includes some 7,000 individuals. It will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars of slavery. I never thought we would find so many fugitives, nor did I expect to find so many extant Lesser Antillean newspapers. I have enjoyed the conferences and workshops we organized and attended that have expanded my intellectual breadth and allowed me to meet so many scholars doing exciting research. I have also loved all the travel associated with these events. My favorite event was probably the Inter-Island Connections in the Lesser Antilles workshop in April 2024 that I organized with team member Gabriëlle La Croix. It was exciting to have a room full of both established and early career Caribbean historians. I am excited to be co-editing and contributing to a special issue that is an outcome of the workshop and will appear in Atlantic Studies: Global Currents. I will also have some other publications come out this year relating to my time with the project. I will remain connected to In the Same Sea, but from the U.S. I will miss my wonderful colleagues, who taught me so much and shared my passion for Caribbean history. I hope I will find an excuse to return to Copenhagen (or see team members in the Caribbean) before too long. I can’t wait to see what else In the Same Sea produces in the time that remains.
Heather Freund
hefr@hum.ku.dk