Researcher Highlights
Exploring Liminal Borders and Revolutionary Realities

Dr Kit Candlin is Senior Lecturer in the History of the Americas at the University of Newcastle Australia. He is a past President of the Australian Association of Caribbean Studies and a member of the Centre for the Study of Violence.

Prior to his engagement at Newcastle, he held a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney and was a research associate for one year at the university of Melbourne. He has written widely on Atlantic themes including American prisoners of war, free women of colour, refugees and slavery in the West Indies with a particular focus on the cross cultural and intercolonial dynamic of the Windward islands of the southern Caribbean. He is a recognized scholar of liminal borders and hinterlands in this broad region.

His first book entitled ‘The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795-1815’ was released through Palgrave-Macmillan in June 2012. In 2016 he published along with Cassandra Pybus, his second book ‘Enterprising Women: Race, Gender and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic 1770-1830’, through Georgia University Press. He is currently working on a history of the Fedon Rebellion that occurred in the British colony of Grenada in 1795. In addition to his new monograph Kit has just completed three articles that are currently under review. The first is entitled ‘Late Eighteenth Century Maroonage in Dominica and Grenada: A Comparison’ the second, ‘Same Sex Activity and Enslavement: A Case Study from Grenada 1765’ while the third is entitled ‘Fear, Dependency and Complicity in late 18th Century Grenada, 1784–1796’.

His most recent work is:

• ‘The Role of the Enslaved in the Fedon Rebellion’. Slavery and Abolition: The Journal of Slave and Post Slave Societies, (December 2018)
• ‘Sir John Gladstone and the Debate Over the Amelioration of Slavery in the British West Indies in the 1820s’ Journal of British Studies(January 2019)
• ‘The Connections Between Granada and Trinidad in the Age of Fedon 1783-1797’ The Journal of Caribbean History (January 2022)
• Refugees of the American War of Independence (2023) book chapter in The Cambridge History of the American Revolution (Cambridge University Press)
• ‘Tracing Women’s Lives: Choice and Constraint Across Grenada’s Fedon Rebellion of 1795’ (2023) in the Journal of the Early American History
• ‘American Prisoners of War in the Captive Atlantic, 1812-1815’
• (2023) (with Peter Hooker) in the Journal of Military History
• ‘A Little Rough in his Manner’: Two Captivity Narratives from Revolutionary Guadeloupe 1795 (2023) Caribbean Quarterly

In addition to his traditional scholarly outputs kit has also played leading roles as a designer and researcher in two documentary films ‘A Regular Black’ which interrogated the literary references to enslavement and the Caribbean in Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights and ‘The Queen of Demerara’ a pilot episode currently under review with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation which explores the life of Dorothy Thomas a free Afro Caribbean businesswoman in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Demerara. He has also played a leading role in creating the website Black Loyalists of the American War of Independence with Cassandra Pybus and Jim Sidbury at www.blackloyalist.info for which he was the lead researcher. He is a regular commentator on radio including JJJ, ABC Radio and RRR. He is also a frequent lecturer to high school students on all aspects of modern and early modern history.

Kit teaches broadly across all aspects of American History, European colonial history, the history of enslavement, gender in the colonial setting and racism. Adept at both modern and early modern history, Kit welcomes projects from candidates in all of these fields.

His most recent successful PhD supervisions include ‘Visible and Vocal: Afro Caribbean Women in British Society 1700-1800’ and ‘From Ship to Shore: American Prisoners of war from the War of 1812’

He is currently supervising:

• ‘Wealth, Waste, and the Alternate Vision of the Highlands put Forward by Robert Somers in 1847’ and ‘Psychoanalytic Cosmology and the Myth of the Hero’.