DEVIN LEIGH, PHD
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  • Research
  • Teaching
Research
Upcoming Presentations
  • Invited Talk, ORIAS Summer Institute for Community College Faculty, UC Berkeley. Presentation Title: "From Invisible to Erased: Women's Work in the Battle of Algiers" (May 2025)​
  • Panel Presentation, 118th Annual Meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association (PCB-AHA), Santa Clara University, Santa Clara. Presentation Title: "The Most Secret Weapons: Sex and Gender as Tools of Resistance to Settler Colonialism in Africa" (August 2025)

Current Publication Projects (not yet accepted)
  • Book: Infamous Experts: Enslavers as Africanists in an Age of Abolition (2027)

Current Publication Projects (accepted)
  • "A Coromantee from Dahomey? On the Meaning of 'Dorme' in Jamaica and the West African Origins of Apongo, an Enslaved Rebel Leader," Slavery & Abolition (forthcoming, 2026)
  • Review of Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades by David Eltis. In American Historical Review (forthcoming 2026)
  • "A Social Pursuit: Music in the Life of Ignatius Sancho." In The Cambridge Companion to Ignatius Sancho, edited by Nicole Aljoe and Kristina Huang (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, Spring 2025)
  • "Gender and Resistance to Settler Colonialism in Africa," teaching module for History for the 21st Century, a collaborative project of the World History Association, directed by Jesse Spohnholz and Brenna Miller (forthcoming, Spring 2025)​​​
  • With Michael Becker, "Answering Equiano: An Enslaver's Sketch of Igboland in an Age of Abolition," The William and Mary Quarterly (forthcoming, October 2025)
  • Review of Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity by Charles Price. In Caribbean Quarterly (forthcoming 2025)
  • Review of Walter Rodney by Rupert Lewis. In the Jamaica Journal (forthcoming 2025)

Dissertation
  • "The Origins of an Archive: Enslavers and the Geopolitics of Knowledge Production in an Age of Abolition" (History, the University of California, Davis, 2021). [Link to entry in ProQuest Dissertations &Theses]

Digital Media Projects
  •  “The Jamaican Airs Exhibit.” Early Caribbean Digital Archive. Northeastern University, 2019.  [Link]

​Academic Journal Articles
  • "An Audacious Review: Unpacking Elsa Goveia's Critique of Eric Williams," The CLR James Journal 30, Nos. 1/2 (2024): 191-220 [Link]
  • “In the Footsteps of Bosman: Archibald Dalzel’s Letter from Anomabo, West Africa, and the Cumulative Tradition of Eighteenth-Century Imperial Ethnography,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 56, 4 (2023): 549-565 [Link]
  • “The Empirical and the Speculative,” Roundtable Contribution to Forum on the 50th Anniversary of Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and Slaves, Eighteenth-Century Studies 56, no. 1 (2022): 13-19 [Link]
  • With Clifton E. Sorrell III, “How to Control the History of a Slave Rebellion: A Case Study from the Sources of Blackwall’s Revolt in St. Mary’s Parish, Jamaica, 1765,” The Journal of Caribbean History Vol. 55, No. 1 (2021): 19-56 [Link]
  • “The View from ‘White Man’s Bay:’ The Captain John Matthews Papers on Sierra Leone at the Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University,” History in Africa Vol. 48 (2021): 383-396 [Link]
  • “A Disagreeable Text: The Uncovered First Draft of Bryan Edwards’s Preface to The History of the British West Indies, c. 1792,” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids Vol. 94, Nos. 1-2 (2020): 39-74 [Link]
  • “The Jamaican Airs: An Introduction to Unpublished Pieces of Musical Notation from Enslaved People in the Eighteenth-century Caribbean,” Atlantic Studies: Global Currents Vol. 17, No. 4 (2020): 462-484 [Link]
  • “The Origins of a Source: Edward Long, Coromantee Slave Revolts, and The History of Jamaica,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies Vol. 40, No. 2 (2019): 295-320 [Link]
  • “Black Caesar’s Klan: Albert Payson Terhune, the Birth of Miami, and the Cultural Battle for an Old Bahamian Legend,” Tequesta: The Journal of History Miami Museum Vol. 75, No. 1 (2015): 49-87 [Link]
  • “Between Swamp and Sea: Bahamian Visitors in Southeast Florida before Miami,” The Florida Historical Quarterly Vol. 93, No. 4 (2015): 511-537 [Link]
  • “Ghost of the Gallows: The Historical Record of Black Caesar,” Creating Knowledge: The LAS Research Journal of DePaul University Vol. 5 (2012): 28-38. [Link]

Encyclopedia Entries
  • "Reddie, Andrew (1771 - 1820)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 14 November 2024 [Link]

Op-Eds and Non-Academic Book Reviews
  • "Reading Eighteenth-Century Enslavers for Sources on the History of Africa and Africans," Americas and Oceania Collections Blog, Blog of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, 24 October 2022 
  • "Window to the Mind: On Brinsley Samaroo and Eric Williams's The Blackest Thing in Slavery Was Not the Black Man: The Last Testament of Eric Williams," Los Angeles Review of Books (2023): online [Link]
 
Academic Book Reviews
  • Review of Introduction to Reparation for Secondary Schools by Verene A. Shepherd and Gabrielle D.L. Hemmings. In Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 70, No. 2 (2024): 266-268 [Link] ​
  • Review of Songs of Slavery and Emancipation by Mat Callahan. In Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies Vol. 43, No. 4 (2022): 834-835 [Link]
  • Review of The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider. In Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 67, No. 4 (2021): 510-512 [Link]
  • Review of Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire by Tom Zoellner. In the Journal of Military History Vol. 85, No. 1 (2021): 209-210 [Link]
  • Review of Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History by Nathaniel Osborn. In The Florida Historical Quarterly Vol. 95, No. 2 (2016): 248-250 [Link]
  • Review of Louisiana and the Gulf South Frontier, 1500 – 1821 by F. Todd Smith. In Journal of Florida Studies Vol. 1, No. 5 (2016): 1-12 [Link]​
​
Past Research Presentations
  • Annual Conference of the World History Association, San Francisco (2024)
  • ORIAS Summer Institute, University of California, Berkeley (2022) [Website]
  • Brown Bag Seminar at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia  (2022)
  • African History Working Group, University of California, Berkeley (2021)
  • Fireside Chat at the Library Company of Philadelphia , Philadelphia (2021) [Video] [Flyer]
  • Atlantic History Colloquium at the University of California, Los Angeles (2021) [Flyer]
  • Brown Bag Seminar at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (2021)   
  • Early American History Lab at the University of California, Davis (2017 - 2020)
  • Annual Conference of the African Studies Association, Boston (2019)
  • Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians, Curacao (2019)                   

Past Research Funders
  • The Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture (2021) [Link]
  • The Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library (2019) [Link]
  • The Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Davis (2019) [Link]
  • The Hemispheric Institute on the Americas at the University of California, Davis (2018)
  • The Graduate Studies program at the University of California, Davis (2017, 2018)
  • The College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Davis (2015, 2016)
  • The History Department at the University of California, Davis (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019)

Service
  • Anonymous Peer Reviewer for Academic Journals (2022 - Present)
​​​Eighteenth-Century Studies, Historical Research, The Eighteenth Century, and Modern Intellectual History​​​​
Banner image: Robert Sayer, A Chart of the Atlantic Ocean (London, 1775)
  • About
  • Research
  • Teaching