Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History, Anthropology, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Director of Latin American Studies

(Spring 2026)

This is a scholarly monograph project for which I have been gathering material in archives in seven countries over many years, periodically shelving the project to write other books, returning to it as circumstances permitted. I’m now ready to complete the project. I focus on oft-ignored and misunderstood Belize, and the extraordinary mythology of its origins and its history as a proto-colony of enslaved laborers, to argue that colonialism in the Americas was seldom what later histories claimed it was. This is hauntological history, populated by the ghosts of a past that is sometimes real but just as often purely imaginary. I can’t wait to write it out—and to chat about it all with my HI colleagues.