Elizabeth Colwill
Associate Professor + Department Chair
Degree
PhD: Binghamton University – State University of New York (SUNY)
Area of Interest
Gender
Slavery
Revolution in the Atlantic World
Biography
Elizabeth Colwill, Associate Professor of American Studies at UHM, is a historian of gender, slavery, and revolution in the Atlantic world, with a specialization in the francophone Caribbean. Her fields of research and teaching include the African diaspora; slavery and emancipation; cultures of violence and the politics of memory; life writing and women’s literature; the history of sexuality; performance studies; and intersectional feminist theory. Her scholarship is situated within transnational fields of inquiry—comparative slavery and colonialism, feminist and postcolonial theory, performance and diaspora studies—that cross temporal and disciplinary boundaries.
Professor Colwill holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Women’s History (SUNY-Binghamton, 1991) and a B.A. in interdisciplinary studies from Evergreen State College (1980). Prior to her position in American Studies where she served as Graduate Chair, she was Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at San Diego State University. Professor Colwill has longstanding interests in feminist pedagogies, social activism, and interdisciplinary education, and has won awards for her teaching and interdisciplinary initiatives. She helped to found, then co-directed from 1999-2005, an interdisciplinary, team-taught general education program designed to increase retention of first-year students. She has spoken, written, and organized conferences in the fields of feminist pedagogies and interdisciplinary education, and developed community partnerships with organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and local, urban high schools. Her interest in exploring intersections between the arts and history is evident in community projects such as the San Diego Women’s History Arts Initiative and a collaboration with Eveoke Dance Theatre Company’s production of Las Mariposas, based upon Julia Alvarez’s novel about women’s resistance to the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.
Her earlier research engaged problems of cultural representation, female authorship, and political pornography. She is now at work on a book-length study of gender, ritual, and slave emancipation in Saint-Domingue, which explores the racial and gender politics of the Haitian Revolution within a transnational, colonial framework. Recent publications include “Gender, Slavery, War and Violence in and beyond the Age of Revolution,” in The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600, ed. Karen Hagemann et al. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming fall 2017); “Crime and Testimony: Life Writing, Pardon Letters, and Microhistory,” co-authored with Peter Arnade, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47, no. 1 (2017); “Freedwomen’s Familial Politics: Marriage, War and Rites of Registry in Post-Emancipation Saint-Domingue,” in Gender, War, and Politics: The Wars of Revolution and Liberation – Transatlantic Comparisons, 1775 – 1820, ed. Karen Hagemann, et al (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. 71-89; “Gendering the June Days: Race, Masculinity, and Slave Emancipation in Saint Domingue,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15 (Spring/Fall 2009): 103-124; and “Fêtes de l’hymen, fêtes de la liberté: Matrimony and Emancipation in Saint-Domingue, 1793,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (University of Indiana Press, 2009), pp. 125-155.
Contact
colwill@hawaii.edu
Moore Hall 304
(808) 956-5531