Thabisile Griffin, PhD, specializes in the 18th century Atlantic world, Black indigeneity, and colonial insecurity. She examines periods of social and political instability to determine changing logics of differentiation and hierarchy—race-making, especially as it applied to African-descendant and native populations in the Caribbean. Her dissertation, entitled The Unmaking of St. Vincent: Colonial Insecurity and Black Indigeneity: 1780-1797, explores how the precarious conditions of colonial militias, property logics, support from the metropole, legislation, and interior and exterior threats, all rendered frail the colonial settlement in and around the island. Her research reveals how changing racial, gender, and class rationalities were vital in attempting to maintain the colonial settlement, and also emphasizes the international and abolitionary nature of the Black indigenous militias against the British army. She has published in various outlets, including the Boston Review and Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, and has lectured and presented her research at Yale, UCLA, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, and the McNeil Center for early American Studies at UPenn. Additionally, she researches and writes on the Black radical tradition across space and time, and global histories of subversion and resistance against colonial and state violence. At Columbia, she will be guest lecturing and facilitating workshops in the History department, and co-directing initiatives for the Global Racisms program and the Ambedkar Initiative, including co-editing a volume of the Art/Politics Series and organizing critical discussions on global racial inequities. Along with lecturing and public programming, she will be presenting her work in the forthcoming AAADS/IRAAS colloquium.
