Catie Peters

Welcome Catherine (Catie) Peters, 2024–2025 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow

Catherine (Catie) Peters is an interdisciplinary historian of the Caribbean whose research centers on overlapping diasporas, intimacy, and the environment. She received her PhD in American Studies from Harvard University in 2021. Dr. Peters has held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and Tufts University, where she has also taught courses in American Studies and Caribbean Studies spanning from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. From 2024-2025, she will hold an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal of Caribbean History, Environmental History, and The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race, among others.

Dr. Peters will join the Omohundro Institute in September 2025 as an OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow to complete her first monograph, Afro-Asian Histories, Ecologies, and Intimacies in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean. The book narrates how people of Asian and African descent forged intertwined lives through specific ecological sites in the Caribbean, such as the market, the garden, and the coast. As a prehistory of Asian indenture, it links migration in the Indian Ocean and revolutionary developments in the Caribbean. As a sociopolitical history, it emphasizes overlapping struggles for self-determination after abolition. Just as technologies of control developed from African chattel slavery to Asian indenture, so too did community-building and mutual aid. By tracing consistent imperial failures to manage the intimate, political, and ecological lives of laboring peoples, the book foregrounds the fugitive routes, testimony, and water knowledges that united the many peoples gathered together in the nineteenth-century Caribbean.