Elise Mitchell

Cimarronas: A Black Women’s Archive of Ayiti-Quisqueya is a digital platform that narrates the histories of ten Black women across the Indigenous island of Ayiti, today’s Republic of Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Using digital mapping tools, post-custodial archiving, animations, biographical narrations, and site visits, the Cimarronas platform will be a trilingual resource to researchers in Caribbean Studies, Geography, and Gender Studies while remaining an accessible teaching platform for college-level educators. Beyond a transnational framework, Cimarronas moves scholars toward an understanding of the island's shared history, particularly in the 16th through 19th centuries.

"Morbid Geographies: Enslavement, Epidemics, and Embodiment in the Early Modern Atlantic World" is a book project that uses the social and cultural history of smallpox as a lens for examining how enslaved Africans and their descendants experienced and contended with the consequences of enslavement and colonialism in the multi-imperial early modern Atlantic World. The racial and gender ideologies borne of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British colonization, slavery, and slave trades placed enslaved Africans at risk of disease. Disease manifested and materialized the aggregate consequences of enslavement and colonialism on the body, within social, spiritual, and geopolitical ties, and, ultimately, had an indelible impact on enslaved Africans voyages to and throughout the Americas between 1500 and 1800. "Smallpox and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World: A Digital History" is a project mapping the spread of smallpox among enslaved Africans in the early modern Atlantic World and a digital companion to the book.