Advisor:  Matt Childs 

Bio: 

Matt is a second-year History PhD student from San Antonio, Texas. He aims to research race and slavery in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions, specifically at the intersections of the Spanish and British Caribbean. His research interests include the construction of racial ideology, transimperial crossings, and the diverse forms of resistance against slave systems.

Matt received his B.A. in History and English from Mississippi College in 2022. As an undergraduate, he completed an Honors Thesis titled “The Routes of Race and Resistance: Self-Liberated Runaways and Runaway Advertisements in the Bahama Islands, 1784-1807.” This thesis examines runaways and how their escapes from slavery shaped ideas about race in the archipelago, and he presented this research in-person at Jackson State University’s CASE Festival and virtually for the Johns Hopkins’ National Undergraduate Humanities Research. His paper “’Known about Town by Those of His Colour’: Constructing Race through Runaway Advertisements in the Bahama Islands, 1783-1807” won the 1st Place Undergraduate Paper Prize at the virtual West-Central Texas Regional PAT Conference, hosted by Texas State University. In the upcoming years, he hopes to continue researching how resistance against slavery influenced racial ideology in transimperial settings.