The UBC Department of History is pleased to welcome Dr. Alycia Hall, who specializes in the history of Jamaica, and in particular, the history of the Afro-descended Maroon communities which populate the mountainous regions of the island, from the seventeenth century to the present. Her research is both invaluable and timely as the Department of History continues to broaden its range of expertise. Dr. Hall will begin her appointment as an Assistant Professor as of July 1, 2024.
Dr. Hall is currently a Joint Postdoctoral Fellow at Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice and John Carter Brown Library at Brown University for the 2023/2024 academic year. While at Brown, she hopes to work on her book manuscript on the Jamaican Maroons in the long nineteenth century. “I’m thrilled to have won such a wonderful fellowship, which will give me the time and space to work on my manuscript amongst a new and critical intellectual community. I look forward to participating in many seminars, research discussions, and workshops with fellows and faculty that are bound to transform my work in interesting and deeply important ways. I find that my scholarship is enhanced when actively participating in interdisciplinary spaces so I hope to similarly contribute to the works of others.”
Dr. Hall, who has defended and filed her dissertation, will receive her Ph.D. in African American Studies and History from Yale University in December 2023. Her manuscript, tentatively titled Strategic Ties: Family, Land, and Plantation Connections in Maroon Jamaica, examines the formation of five Jamaican Maroon communities and their interactions with other peoples and groups in Jamaica from the Second Maroon War of the 1790s to the 1890s. Parsing through intricate relationalities, Hall’s work traces how Maroon communities navigated a changing social, political, and economic world as Jamaica transitioned from slavery to free labour. Her research seeks to extend the history of these communities into the 1890s in order to understand the ways in which Maroons actively attempted to command their place in Jamaican society.
Looking ahead to her appointment at UBC, Dr. Hall is excited to centre the experience of the African Diaspora in History classrooms. “I am eager to join the dynamic faculty and be a part of a community where opportunities for mentorship and collaboration are abundant,” she writes. “I cannot wait to teach and learn from the students who take my classes on the history of the African Diaspora.”
