ShepherdSOCIAL AND economic historian, Dr. Verene Shepherd, has been appointed Professor in the Department of History at the UWI, Mona Campus.
Professor Shepherd is an expert in the field of 19th century immigration history in the Caribbean and has done original work on the previous slavery period by looking at enslaved peoples outside of the context of the usual large sugar plantations. She has also done extensive work on the immigration of Asian Indians into the Caribbean and the history of historically marginalised groups.
She holds the Bachelor of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees in History from the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus and the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from the University of Cambridge.
Since 1989, she has been Lecturer and later Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the UWI, Mona Campus. Professor Shepherd is a highly respected academic who has taught at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels and has successfully supervised a number of postgraduate research students, locally and internationally.
She has taught courses on Caribbean History, the History of the Atlantic World, Women in Caribbean History, Comparative Economic History of Slavery, History of the USA and Caribbean Historiography.
Verene Shepherd's most important and sustained research interest has been the Indian peoples of Jamaica. Her book, Transients to Settlers: The Experience of Indians in Jamaica, 1845-1950, enlarged understanding of the ways in which the Indians in Jamaica adjusted to and shaped their environment as well as the challenges they confronted over time. Her forthcoming book, Maharani's Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India, delves more deeply into the history of the subaltern Indians, centering the experiences of the Indian woman. She is also well known for the important books on Caribbean history that she has compiled, edited and co-edited.
These books are focused primarily on slavery, the post slavery period and the experiences of women in the Caribbean.
They include Women in Caribbean History (which was judged the Best Locally Published Text Book by the Jamaica Book Industry in 1999); Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader; Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective; Caribbean Freedom: Society & Economy from Emancipation to the Present, which was the recipient of the Jamaica Book Industry Award for the Best locally Produced Book (1994) Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader; Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora and Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture.
