Chelsey Smith | History PhD Candidate, University of Pittsburgh | crs150@pitt.edu
MA in History, University of Pittsburgh, 2019
BA in History, University of Central Arkansas, 2017
Bio:
In 2017, I graduated from the University of Central Arkansas, summa cum laude, with my Bachelor of Arts degree in History and a minor in Spanish and interdisciplinary studies. That fall, I started my graduate school journey at Pitt. I am broadly interested in education, race, and labor in the Caribbean and Latin America, and I specialize in nineteenth century Jamaican history. In 2019, I earned my Master of Arts in History from the University of Pittsburgh. My Master’s Thesis, “Cultivating Free Children’s Minds: Child Labor and Education in Apprenticeship-Era Jamaica, 1834-1838” explored freedpeople’s engagement with the early system of education and their strong disapproval of freed children laboring on plantations in Jamaica during the apprenticeship period. I am currently working on my dissertation, which centers the role that education played in the lives of Afro-Jamaican adults and their children as they navigated the difficulties of obtaining land, voting, and citizenship rights from the advent of the abolition of slavery in 1834 to the aftermath of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion.
Dissertation Committee:
Dr. Lara Putnam (Advisor)
Dr. George Reid Andrews
Dr. Molly A. Warsh
Dr. Michele Reid-Vazquez
Research Interests:
Caribbean History
Latin American History
Child Labor and Education
Education in Post-Emancipation Societies
Race and Labor History
Fellowships:
2017-2018 K. Leroy Irvis Predoctoral Fellow
2020-2021 Social Science Doctoral Dissertation Fellow
2021-2022 Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow
Teaching Appointments:
Independent Instructor | Caribbean History | 2020 Summer I Term
Teaching Fellow | World Environmental History & Digital Mapping Practicum | Spring 2020
Teaching Fellow | Russia to 1917 | Fall 2019
Teaching Assistant | World War II in Europe | Spring 2019
Teaching Assistant | US History II | Fall 2018
Presentations:
“Cultivating Free Children’s Minds: Child Labor and Education in Apprenticeship-Era Jamaica, 1834-1838” | Panel: Education and Youth | Society for Caribbean Studies Conference | July 2021
“‘What is for me is not for my master’: Land, Labor, and Family in Apprenticeship-Era Jamaica, 1834-1838” | Panel: Colonialism and Slavery in the Caribbean | History Graduate Research Forum | University of Pittsburgh | March 2021
“Plantation Slavery, Bondage, and Environmental Degradation” | Guest Lecture | World Environmental History | February 26, 2020