I am a Professor in the Department of History at McMaster University where I teach courses on the history of the Caribbean, imperial history, the history of the African diaspora, and the history of colonial health and medicine. I am also the former president of the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

I am affiliated with McMaster’s Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition and the Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice. I am also an associate fellow with the Centre for Research in Latin America and the Caribbean and am associated with the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples, both at York University. Before joining McMaster, I taught at York University, Western Michigan University, and held a DuBois-Garvey-Rodney fellowship at the Center for African American and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

My research concentrates on the 19th and 20th century Caribbean in the context of the African diaspora and the British empire. I address such topics as urban history, gender, the history of childhood, the social history of health and medicine, and reproductive health.

My most recent book is Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).  It explores ideas and policies about population growth and infant and maternal welfare in British Caribbean colonies from the nineteenth century to the 1930s.  I recently was awarded the 2022 Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize by the Association of Caribbean Historians for “The Death of Molly Schulz: Race, Magic, and the Law in the Post-Slavery Caribbean,” The Journal of Social History 55, no. 2 (2021): 345-373.