New postdoc - Heather Freund

Heather Freund is a postdoctoral researcher with the In the Same Sea project. In the project, she focuses on Enslaved Movement. She is in charge of the maroon database, which tracks runaway events using colonial newspapers, with a special interest in maritime marronage. Additionally, she plans to look at enslaved sailors and soldiers. She will also examine the position of the indigenous peoples of the eastern Caribbean concerning colonial European powers and slavery.

Heather received her PhD in History from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2021. She is a historian of the British Empire and Atlantic World, with a focus on Anglo-French interactions in the southern Caribbean. She is interested in how imperial legal regimes ruled peoples from other empires and in tracing connections between islands. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled, Contested Sovereignty: Race, Law, and Subjecthood in the Ceded Islands, 1763-1797, examines how the diverse peoples who lived in the southern Caribbean islands of Grenada, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago negotiated their position within the British Empire across race, religious, and class lines within and outside the law.