Post-Doc
Halle-Mackenzie Ashby is a historian of Caribbean slavery and emancipation, and her research concerns questions about gender, reproduction, carceral studies and racial capitalism. Before coming to the UCSB Black Studies department as the President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, she earned her PhD at Johns Hopkins University. She is the former African American History Mellon Scholars Dissertation Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is currently working on a book manuscript which center’s reproduction and struggles over it as a lens through which to examine the role of the law and carceral punishment in the construction and dissolution of slavery in the Early Modern and Modern Caribbean. In it, she delineates the relationship between Atlantic slavery’s matrilineal principle and the making of post-emancipation Barbados carceral state.