Dr. Catherine R. Peters

I am a writer, teacher, and researcher based in Washington, D.C. My work attends to empire, overlapping diasporas, and the environment in the hemispheric Americas.

I hold a PhD in American Studies with a secondary field in Latinx Studies from Harvard University. My graduate training was in history, literary studies, and ethnic studies.

I am writing a book that traces histories of Asian arrival to the Caribbean during the years before and after the abolition of African chattel slavery. I show that people of Asian and African descent have long formed alliances and managed ecological risk, in spite of colonial attempts at racial management, labor discipline, and extractivism. My dissertation received Honorable Mention from the Caribbean Studies Association for the Best Dissertation written over two years.

My work on breath and revolution is forthcoming as part of The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race. I have an essay, “‘The Greatest Attributes of Freedom’: Water, Kinship, and the Village Movement in Colonial Guyana,” in the Journal of Caribbean History. I also have an article, “Imperatives, Impossibilities, and Intimacies in the Imperial Archive: Chinese Men and Women of Colour in Early Nineteenth-Century Trinidad,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Other writing has appeared in the pages of Environmental History, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, and the Journal of Early American History.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Subsequently, I will take up an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship.

From 2021-2023, I held postdoctoral positions at Yale University and Tufts University. From 2023-2024, I taught Caribbean Studies, Latinx Studies, Global Afro-Asia, and Methods in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. My teaching centers on interpreting the past with concern for equity in present. I am a lifelong student of Spanish and French as well as, over the last decade, Hindi and Mandarin.