Professor Matthew J. Smith

Matthew J. Smith is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. Prior to this, Professor Smith worked at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica where he was Professor of Caribbean History. He has special interest in the nineteenth and twentieth-century histories of Haiti and Jamaica.

He has published widely on Caribbean History, with over fifty scholarly articles. Among his publications is Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), a comparative study which explored the post-slavery intersections between the two Caribbean neighbours with a focus on overlapping narratives and shared migration histories. His earlier book, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political Change, 1934-1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) studied the activities of radical political groups that emerged after the US Occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and prior to the establishment of the dictatorship of François Duvalier in 1957. He is also co-editor with Diana Paton of The Jamaica Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2021), and editor of Volume 3 (The Twentieth Century) of The Cambridge History of the Caribbean.

Professor Smith is director and producer of the 2018 documentary film, The Past Is Not Our Future: Walter Rodney’s Student Years. He has served as President of the Haitian Studies Association, Chair of the Department of History and Archaeology, UWI-Mona, and held visiting and research positions at Duke University, University of Michigan, Williams College, and the National Humanities Center. He is currently writing a social history of Jamaican popular music.  

PhD supervision

Matt is interested in supervising projects on Caribbean History from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. 

Major Publications

• The Jamaica Reader: History, Culture Politics co-edited with Diana Paton (Durham: Duke University Press, expected 2021).
• Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
• Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
• “Pursuance: The Movement of The Common Wind,” roundtable discussion on Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London: Verso Press, 2019), American Historical Review, 125:3 (June 2020): 921-925.
• “Parallel Motion: Shared Histories of War, Reform, and Power in the Eighteenth Century Caribbean,” Review Essay. Slavery and Abolition, 38:3 (2017): 645-652.
• “A Tale of Two Tragedies: The Earthquakes in Kingston (1907) and Port-au-Prince (2010),” Karib: Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 4:1 (11) (November 2019). 

Grants/Fellowships

Matt has held several major research grants, fellowships and visiting professorships including, Sterling A. Brown Visiting Professor in Africana Studies, Williams College, National Humanities Center Fellowship, Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor, Duke University, Rodney-Dubois-Mandela Fellowship, University of Michigan, and J. William Fulbright Scholarship, University of Florida. 

Media Appearances    

Matt makes regular media appearances in the Caribbean, the US, and the UK, in which he discusses Caribbean politics and culture and the legacies of British slavery in the UK.

Teaching 

Public History, Slavery, and the British Colonial Past (MA Module)
 

Contact information

Email: matthew.smith@ucl.ac.uk  

Office: 201, 24 Gordon Square

Drop/In and Feedback Hours: Mondays and Tuesdays, 1-2pm by appointment

Student support & feedback hours are an opportunity for students to chat with their module tutors about their ideas, any support they might need with the module, and to go through feedback from their assessments.