Liz Egan
I am primarily a social and cultural historian of Britain and the Caribbean, interested in the negotiations of race, class, and gender in the post-emancipation Caribbean. My current research considers the category of "whiteness" in Jamaica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and my first article examining how whiteness was articulated through narratives surrounding the 1865 Morant Bay uprising is now available online with Slavery & Abolition.
I am an Associate Fellow Advance HE and I am currently a Teaching Fellow in Modern European History at Warwick, convening the modules HI178 Farewell to Arms? War in Modern European History, 1815-2015 and HI996 Themes & Approaches to the Historical Study of Gender & Sexuality. Alongside teaching at Warwick, I am also a Research Associate in the Legacies of Enslavement at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge.
I am also the Early Career Representative for History UK, in which capacity I organise the annual Academic Jobs Boot Camp. As a committee member for the Society for Caribbean Studies, I also serve as the Conference Coordinator and am excited to be organising the 48th Annual conference (2025), which will be held in Bristol.
Academic Profile
2024-2025: Teaching Fellow in Modern European History, University of Warwick
2024-2025: Research Associate in the Legacies of Enslavement at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge
2023-2024: Early Career Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick
2019-2023: PhD History, University of Warwick
2017-2019: MA World History and Cultures, King's College London
2013-2017: BA History (International), University of Leeds
Research
My current research builds on my doctoral project, which was supervised by Professor David Lambert at the University of Warwick and Dr Sascha Auerbach at the University of Nottingham, and kindly funded by Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. Framed between the 1865 Morant Bay uprising and labour unrest of the 1930s, this project attends to the everyday spaces through Jamaica's pigmentocracy was negotiated by locating whiteness at the intersections of race, class, colour, and gender. I consider how discourses of race in Jamaica were forged in dialogue with those produced in Britain, demonstrating how the tensions of the colonial relationship reveal the ambivalency and contingency of whiteness in colonial Jamaica.
I am also beginning work on a new project concerned with the role of policing in the post-emancipation Caribbean. This work seeks to understand policing as a site of interaction that can deliver new insight into the negotiations of race, gender, and citizenship alongside the consolidation of the modern colonial state.
Publications
Articles
Egan, Liz, ‘The Morant War of Representation: Freedom and Whiteness in Jamaican Narratives of the Morant Bay Uprising’, Slavery & Abolition (2024), https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2024.2347603
Book Reviews
Egan, Liz, ‘World War II Camps in Jamaica: Evacuees, Refugees, Internees, Prisoners of War By Suzanne Francis-Brown, Modern British History, 35.3 (2024), 391–393, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae045
Other publications
“Representing Colonial Otherness” in AM Research Methods: Interrogating Colonial Archives and Narratives (Marlborough: AM, 2024)
Warwick Global History and Culture Centre Blog: New Frontiers in Imperial Networks Workshop (7 July 2023)
Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre Blog, Unhomely Empire, A Forum (22 November 2022)
Warwick HRC, At Home in Empire blog series: At Home in Empire? Whiteness and Jamaica in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2020-21)
Awards and Funding
- Early Career Fellowship, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick (2023/24)
- David Nicholls Memorial Trust Award (2022)
- Gad Heuman Postgraduate Bursary, Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick (2021-2022)
- AHRC Midlands 4 Cities doctoral fellowship (2019-2023)
- Warwick Humanities Research Centre Doctoral Fellowship (2020-2021)
- Jinty Nelson Prize awarded to the MA History student achieving the highest cumulative score on completion of the programme, King’s College London (2019)
- World History and Culture MA Prize awarded to a student studying the MA in World History and Culture who achieves the highest cumulative score, King’s College London (2019)
- John Le Patourel Prize for best dissertation, University of Leeds (2017)
- Alice M Cooke Prize for best overall performance of female student in final year, University of Leeds (2017)
Select Conference Papers
Royal Geographic Society Annual Conference, 27-30 August 2024: The Place of Whiteness in Jamaica after the Morant Bay Uprising
Social History Society Conference, University of Durham, 8-10 July 2024: Wages of Whiteness: Labour, Leisure, and the Place of Race in New Jamaica, c.1865-1938
Race, Crime, and Justice in Britain and its Empire, 1750-1999, University of Liverpool, 20-22 May 2024: “British Justice” in New Jamaica: Race and Authority in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Jamaica Constabulary Force
Cambridge Legal and Social History Workshop, University of Cambridge, 27 February 2024: The ‘balance of justice’ after Morant Bay: negotiating whiteness in Jamaican courtroom cultures, 1865-1938
Society for Caribbean Studies Conference, 5-8 July 2023: The Story of a West Indian Policeman: Race, Class, and Justice in the Jamaica Constabulary Force
Personal Writing and Textual Practices in the British Empire, C19th-20th, Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS), University of Leicester, 14 April 2023: The Story of a West Indian Policeman: Race, Class, and Justice in Inspector Herbert Thomas’s Memoir
North American Conference of British Studies, 10-13 November 2022: ‘The least Jamaican of everything pertaining to the country’: Whiteness, Belonging, and Home in Jamaica, 1865-1938
Society for Caribbean Studies Conference UK, 5-9 July 2022: At Home in Jamaica: Reproducing Creole Whiteness in Jamaica, 1865-1938
Culture, Things and Empire Research Seminar, 21 April 2021: Reading Race in Black and White: Constructing Whiteness in Jamaican Newspapers
Memberships
- Society for Caribbean Studies (Conference Coordinator)
- Royal Historical Society (Associate Fellow)
- Social History Society
- Global History and Culture Centre Warwick
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North American Conference of British Studies
Other Professional Activities
Early Career Representative, History UK (2023-onwards)
Conference Coordinator, Society for Caribbean Studies Committee, 2023-25
New Frontiers in Imperial Networks Workshop, 5 May 2023
At Home in Empire: Colonial Experiences of Intimacy and Mobility conference, 13 March 2021 (Warwick Humanities Research Centre Doctoral Fellowship, co-organised with Hannah Dennett)
Warwick Postgraduate Podcast Series Spring/Summer 2020 (organising committee)
Training
Academic and Professional Pathway for Postgraduate Researchers who Teach, Academic Development Centre, University of Warwick, 2023-24
University of the West Indies and University of Leicester International Summer School, UWI Mona, 23-27 May 2022
Royal Literary Fund Second Year Stretch Workshop, 5, 6 and 12 June 2021
'Becoming an Anti-Racist in the Academy' workshop by BRAP, 5-6 January 2021
Preparing to Teach in Higher Education online course, University of Warwick, 30 September 2020
Visual Sources for Historians, Institute of Historical Research, February-March 2020
Royal Literary Fund Writing Workshop, Birmingham City University with Midlands4cities, 19-20 February 2020
elizabeth dot a dot egan at warwick dot ac dot uk
Pronouns: She/her
Teaching
In 2024/2025 I am convening the following modules:
HI1780 Farewell to Arms? War in Modern European History, 1815-2015, Whole Year
HI1996 Themes & Approaches to the Historical Study of Gender & Sexuality, Spring Term
Office Hours: Thursday, 12-13pm (Booking only)
Friday, 11-12pm (In person drop-in)
I have previously taught on undergraduate modules Race, Ethnicity, and Migration in Modern Britain (HI2D4), Britain in the Twentieth Century: A Social History (HI180), Making of the Modern World (HI153), and the Research Project (HI2E4).
Monument to the Rt. Excellent George William Gordon & the Rt. Excellent Paul Bogle, Kingston, Jamaica
Presenting at SCS Conference 2023, image courtesy of Dr Jo Norcup
Bluesky: @lizegan.bsky.social