Elizabeth Cooper’s scholarship, inside and outside the academy, explores the praxes of freedom that have been made possible or foreclosed as a result of social struggles in the post-emancipation “Black Atlantic.” She received her PhD in History from the University of Chicago and has held fellowships at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (UCL), the Institute of the Americas (UCL), the Centre for the Study of International Slavery (University of Liverpool) and the Centre for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (University of Chicago).
Elizabeth has taught at University College London, the University of Nottingham, the University of Chicago, and Florida International University. Her research has been published in the journals Slavery and Abolition, Dialectical Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies as well as with Duke University Press and the University of Chicago Press. For nearly ten years Elizabeth was Curator of the Caribbean and Latin American Collections at the British Library. Her major exhibitions include Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land (the British Library, 2018) and Sowing Roots: Caribbean Gardening Heritage (The Garden Museum, 2021-22).
Selected Exhibitions
Sowing Roots, the Garden Museum, 2021.
Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land, the British Library, 2018.
Selected Publications
“Mulatto,” “Pardo,” “Quilombo dos Palmares” and “Sugar Industry,” South America: from European Contact to Independence, H. Micheal Tarver and Carlos Marquez eds., Santa Barbara: ABL-CIO/Bloomsbury, forthcoming Summer 2024.
“Playing Against Empire,” Slavery & Abolition, Volume 39, Issue 3, 2018.
“The Conundrum of Race: Retooling Inequality,” The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its People, Stephan Palmié and Francisco Scarano eds., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
