Teanu Reid

Teanu (pronounced Tiana) Reid is a joint Ph.D. student in History and African American Studies. Her dissertation project explores the hidden economic activities of enslaved and free people of color in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina from 1670-1770. She examines how African descended people participated in local Atlantic economies not only as laborers but also as sellers and consumers, as they tried to sustain themselves under the harsh circumstances of slavery and living within slave societies. In this discussion, Reid asks, how did “money” itself – and the things used as money in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century British Atlantic world – further constrain the economic activities of both free and enslaved people of color?

 

Thus far, Reid’s research has been supported by MMUF (Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship); the Social Science Research Council; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; the Yale Office for Graduate Student Development & Diversity; the John Carter Brown Library; and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Before coming to Yale, Teanu received her B.A. in History, with Honors and Magna Cum Laude, from CUNY Brooklyn College (2016).