Dr Liz Egan
My research interests are broadly focused on British colonialism in the Caribbean, particularly the post-emancipation period stretching into the early twentieth century. I am currently developing my doctoral thesis into a monograph, which considers how people were thinking about "whiteness" in Jamaica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More broadly, I am interested in histories of slavery, emancipation, and racialisation in the colonial Caribbean. In my new work, I am developing a project that employs policing as a lens through which to reconsider the transition from enslavement across a long post-emancipation period.
I am also interested in the legacies of enslavement in Britain and the methodologies we might employ to write such histories. I was previously the Research Associate in the Legacies of Enslavement at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge.Link opens in a new window
I am an Associate Fellow of Advance HE and have taught on a wide range of modules. Outside teaching and research, I am the Early Career Representative for History UKLink opens in a new window and organise the annual Academic Jobs Boot Camp,Link opens in a new window as well as the Vice-Chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies (2025-27)Link opens in a new window.Academic Profile
2024-2029: Teaching Fellow in Modern History, University of Warwick
2024-2026: 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
Teaching
In 2026/27, I am convening the following modules:
- HI178 Farewell to Arms? War in Modern European History, 1815-2015
- HI2E8 Caribbean Currents: A Global History
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), Themes in Modern History (HI998), Themes & Approaches to the Historical Study of Gender & Sexuality (HI996), and Statues must fall? Remembering and forgetting slavery in the Atlantic world (HI3S8).
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 which Jamaica's pigmentocracy was negotiated. Moving across case studies such as the home or hotel, I locate whiteness at the intersections of race, class, colour, and gender to emphasise the ambivalences 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 draws on the concept of Caribbean in/securities (Noxolo 2018) to explore the role of the policing in the maintenance of post-emancipation (un)free labour regimes.
Publications
Articles
“‘A Lazy Mistress Makes a Lazy Servant’: Domestic Labor and White Creole Womanhood in Jamaica, ca.1865–1938.” Journal of British Studies, 64 (2025), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.184.
“The Morant War of Representation: Freedom and Whiteness in Jamaican Narratives of the Morant Bay Uprising.” Slavery & Abolition, 45.4 (2024), 850–69. doi: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)
Select Conference Papers
Social History Society Conference, Black Country Living Museum, 7-9 July 2025: Policing Freedom: The Jamaican Constabulary Force and the post-emancipation civilizing mission
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
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
Memberships
- Society for Caribbean Studies
- Royal Historical Society (Associate Fellow)
- Social History Society
- Global History and Culture Centre Warwick
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)
