Patrick Barker
Welcome Patrick Barker, 2025-2026 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow
Patrick Barker is an assistant professor of History at Miami Dade College–Hialeah Campus. He received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2023. In 2024, his dissertation—“‘She Would Cut Canes No Longer: Slavery and Everyday Struggle in Trinidad, 1769-1834”—was awarded the Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize from the Southern Historical Association’s (SHA) Latin American and Caribbean Section, while in 2022, a paper drawn from the project received the Ralph J. Woodward Prize from the same organization. In June 2023, a peer-reviewed article connected to the dissertation was published in The Journal of Caribbean History.
During his time as an OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Barker will be advancing work on his manuscript titled With Her Cutlass Always Raised: Slavery and Everyday Struggle in the Plantation Caribbean. The manuscript, informed by research in manuscript and print collections in archives in the U.K., France, Spain, the U.S., and the Caribbean, offers a detailed study of everyday life and resistance in Trinidadian slave society in the wake of the island’s transformation into a deadly plantation society during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, across both late-Spanish (1763-1797) and early British rule (1797-1834). Centering the quotidian struggles of enslaved people who left no written traces behind, the book reconstructs the everyday and collective resistance strategies deployed by enslaved African and Afro-Caribbean people to combat the labor exploitation, social isolation, poverty, and restricted mobility of life under plantation slavery on the island.
A former graduate affiliate fellow at Yale University’s Program in Agrarian Studies, Dr. Barker’s research on slavery and slave resistance in Trinidad has been generously supported by fellowships from Yale University’s MacMillan Center, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Omohundro Institute’s Lapidus Predoctoral Fellowship for Slavery and Print Culture in the Early American and Transatlantic World, the William L. Clements Library, and the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, among others. Before taking up his OI-NEH fellowship in summer 2025, he will also serve as an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Community College Research Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, where he will be conducting additional research for his book manuscript.
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