Reflections on researching the Caribbean and Black Canadian history. An interview with Michele Johnson

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our appreciation to Nadim Al Kakhl and Nnamdi Nnake for transcribing the interview. We also appreciate the support of McMaster University’s Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice, which sponsored the event from which this interview is taken, and the help of the Centre’s research administrator, Dr Melike Yilmaz. And we are grateful to McMaster University’s Africa and Black Studies program (and to its director, Alpha Abebe) for helping support this event.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michele Johnson

Michele Johnson is a professor in the History Department at York University, the Associate Dean of Students in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Juanita De Barros

Juanita De Barros is a professor in the Department of History at McMaster University and the director of the Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice. Her research concentrates on the history of health and gender in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Caribbean. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters and two monographs: Order and Place: Patterns of Struggle and Resistance in Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889–1924 and Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery. She has co-edited four essay collections, including the 2022 special issue of Histoire sociale/Social History, “Finding Home Abroad? Building Caribbean Communities in Canada and Beyond”.

Matthew Monrose

Matthew Monrose is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at McMaster University. He is currently writing a dissertation concerned with the postwar history of Toronto’s Black communities. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how the analytically distinct concepts of race and ethnicity function individually and collectively to curate Black identity in Toronto. Matthew is the recipient of the 2023 Corsini Fellowship in Canadian History.