Michael Becker

Michael Becker is Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maryland College Park, as well as project manager and associate editor for the Slavery, Law, and Power Project (slaverylawpower.org). He teaches courses on the colonial Americas, the African diaspora in the early modern Atlantic world, and digital humanities. His scholarship broadly focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British and French Caribbean, with particular interests in enslaved people’s political, social, and cultural formations. He is currently working on a book manuscript, "Practices of Freedom: Everyday Struggles for Autonomy, Community, and Power in Jamaica, 1780-1840," which examines how enslaved and freed people confronted day-to-day challenges and developed a repertoire of strategies and techniques to wrest greater freedom from planters, other enslavers, and the state in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Jamaica. His work has been supported by the American Historical Association, the Fulbright Program, John Carter Brown Library,and the Princeton University Libraries. He holds a PhD in History from Duke University.