Research Expertise and Interest

Colonial America, early America, Native America, early Caribbean

Research Description

Kathleen Donegan is an associate professor in the Department of English.  Her research involves England's earliest settlements in the Americas, and identifies in the narratives and reports from those settlements a discourse of catastrophe: a mode of writing that forged an inextricable relationship between suffering and violence out of which the first models of coloniality emerged.  Her current project is a narrative history of cruelty and defiance on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean island of Nevis, which she traces through two explosive court cases and the acts of collective resistance that surrounded them.