Melanie J. Newton

Melanie J. Newton

First Name: 
Melanie J.
Last Name: 
Newton
Title: 
Chair, Graduate Program and Professor of History and Caribbean Studies (She/Her)
Phone : 
416-978-3758
Office Location : 
Sidney Smith Hall, 2063 or 2072, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3
Biography : 

For History Graduate matters please send your email to history.tricampus@utoronto.ca.

Melanie J. Newton is Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where she teaches Caribbean and Atlantic World History. Her publications include The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Louisiana State University Press, 2008); “Returns to a Native Land? Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean” (Small Axe, vol. 41, July 2013, pp. 108-122) and “Counterpoints of Conquest: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Lesser Antilles and the Ethnocartography of Genocide,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 2, April 2022, 241-282.

At the University of Toronto, she has served in various administrative roles, including Director of the Caribbean Studies Program, Chair of the Faculty of Arts and Science Academic Appeals Board and Associate Chair (Graduate) of the Department of History from 2022-2024. She is currently the Tricampus Graduate Chair for the Department of History (2024-2029). From 1996-98 she served as youth representative on the Barbados Constitution Review Commission, which recommended that Barbados move from its status as a constitutional monarchy to a republic. The government of Barbados took up the commission's recommendation in 2021. She served as co-chair of the City of Toronto's Community Advisory Committee on the renaming of Dundas St and Yonge-Dundas Square.

Education: 
DPhil, Oxford University
BA, McGill University

People Type:

Roles:

Research Area:

Areas of Interest: 

Histories of the Caribbean and the Atlantic World; slavery and emancipation; Indigenous and African diaspora; gender, social history, law.

Cross-Appointments: 
Centre for Caribbean Studies

Campus: