Joseph Biggerstaff

My dissertation, "Sustaining Place: Households, Slavery, and the Plantation Economy, 1640-1740," explores the connections between the early modern household and the Caribbean plantation complex in Barbados during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It examines the motives and activities of a wide array of actors, including widows, children, and enslaved people in domestic settings, against a patriarchal institutional order focused on the preservation of large integrated plantations through an ongoing demographic crisis. It considers the predicament and resilience of enslaved people, particularly domestic servants, forced to survive and navigate legal warfare among slaveowners. By investigating how the enforcement of property rights by metropolitan merchants continually clashed with an emerging notion of "equity" in this creolizing society, the dissertation rethinks the foundation of the modern plantation economy in the Caribbean.

From 2022 to 2024, I participated in a collaborative project titled "Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World: Gender, Trauma, and Trafficking in Transcultural Perspective (1500-1800)" with three other early-career researchers that was funded by the Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme (through the DAAD and Universities Australia). I am also contributing a case study on gullies and enslaved agency for an edited volume, Slavery and the Environment in the Atlantic World, which is currently under review through a university press.

In the spring of 2026, I will be a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.

 2021–2025
PhD in History, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn

2017–2021
MA in Global History, Free University of Berlin/Humboldt University of Berlin

2008–2011
BA in History and Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University

2021–2025
Research Assistant and Lecturer at Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies in Bonn, Germany

2016–2017
Lecturer in English and History at Higher Philological School in Wroclaw, Poland

2026   
Yale University, Gilder Lehrman Center for Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition: one-month fellowship

2023–2025
Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme grant: "Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World: Gender, Trauma, and Trafficking in Transcultural Perspective (1500–1800)"

• 2024. "Children, Dependency, and Emotions in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800: Archival and Visual Narratives," Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, Sep. 12–14.

• 2024. "On Archives, Alternative Archives, and the Epistemology of the Detail," workshop with Claudia Jarzebowski and Ann Laura Stoler, BCDSS, Sep. 12.
• 2023. "Plantations and Other Forms of Mass Coercion," roundtable co-organized with Ulbe Bosma, BCDSS, Nov. 24.
• 2023. "Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World," workshop, BCDSS, Oct. 16–18.
• 2019. "Presenting Work in Academic English for Non-native Speakers of English," workshop at Global Histories Student Conference, Free University of Berlin, Jun. 1–2.
• 2019. Panel on Global Environmental History, Global Histories Student Conference, Free University of Berlin, Jun. 1–2. 

• 2025. "Sustaining Place: Gender, Property, and the Integrated Plantation, 1640–1740,"  Graduate Seminar, University of Copenhagen, Sep. 19.
• 2025. "'In Case the Said Molley Shall Refuse to Bind or Suffer to be Bound': Sustaining Place in the Atlantic World of Slavery and Dependency, 1640–1740," Caribbean Connections: Seventeenth-Century Barbados and Britain, King's College London, Jun. 25–26.
• 2025. "A New Course to the Sea: A Deep History of the Barbadian Gully and the Integrated Plantation," Multilingual Connections and Under-represented Geographies, 56th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians, Jun. 1–5.
• 2025. "Human-Animal Entanglements in the Barbadian Gully," Entangled Lives: Exploring the (Inter)Dependency between People and Animals in the Americas, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, Jun. 17–18.
• 2024. "Sustaining Slavery and Record Keeping in the Atlantic Household" (chair Karwan Fatah-Black), Slavery and Servitude Seminar, Leiden University, Oct. 10–11.
• 2024. "Mapping the Barbadian Gully and Environment of the Atlantic Plantation, 1640–1848," Symposium on Slavery and the Environment in the Atlantic World, University of Kansas, May 16–17.
• 2024. "Orphans in an Infant Society: Crises and Dependency in Early Barbados, 1640–1730," Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Seminar Series (CRMS), Monash University, Mar. 15.
• 2023. "Separate Ways: Legal Practices and Serial Displacement in the Atlantic World, 1660–1730," Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World Workshop, BCDSS, Oct. 16–18.
• 2021. "Settler Mobility and the Global Plantation Complex, 1898–1946," Annual Western Historical Association Conference, Oct. 27–29.
• 2021. "Ecology, Knowledge, and Power in the Plantation Complex: 1624–1700," Graduate Conference in European History, University of Vienna, Apr. 7–9. 

• 2025. "Early Modern Child Slavery: Trafficking and Transcultural Space," American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Jan. 3–6. 

• 2024. Moderator, "Women of the British Atlantic Slave Trade," with Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery, Jun. 17.
• 2024. Panelist, "Book Discussion: Slavery and Dependency: Comparative Approaches in Global History," with Benedetta Rossi, Paulin Ismard, Stephan Conermann, Claudia Jarzebowski, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery, Jun. 4.

• In Flux: Dependency and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Spring 2025)
• Slavery, Dependency, and the Anthropocene (Fall 2023)
• Cultural Heritage and German Global History (Spring 2023)
• Doing Research I: Text-based Sources (Fall 2022)
• Doing Research I: Material Culture Studies (Spring 2022)
• Dependency and Slavery in Transcultural Comparison (Spring 2022)
• Colonialism, Racism, Antisemitism in Recent Debates on German Culture Heritage (Spring 2022)

• Social and Cultural History of the Early Modern North Atlantic II (Spring 2017)
• Social and Cultural History of the Early Modern North Atlantic I (Fall 2016)

• 2024–2025  PhD Representative, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies
• 2018–2020  Editorial board member at Global Histories: A Student Journal
• 2018–2020  Conference organizer for Global History Student Conference

Edited Volumes

• In press. "Environmental Labor and Subterranean Marronage: A Deep History of the Barbadian Gully, 1660-1760." In Enslavement and the Environment, edited by Roberts and Isenberg. University of North Carolina Press. [Under consideration]

Journal Articles

• 2023. "The Plantation and Land Which Was Hers Before: Power and Possession in Barbados, 1680–1750." Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society LXIX: 1–27.

Book Reviews

• 2021. "Review of Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Richard Evans." Sozialwissenschaftliche Literatur Rundschau 82(1): 117–119.
• 2019. "Review of How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr." Global Histories: A Student Journal 5(2): 148–152.