Dexter Gabriel

Assistant Professor

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Ph.D., Stony Brook University – NY

Areas of Specialty

Black Atlantic, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, and Slavery in Popular Culture

Current Research Interests

Abolitionist Strategies, Post-Emancipation Societies

Biography

Dr. Dexter Gabriel earned his B.A. in history from Texas State University-San Marcos, an M.A. in history also from Texas State University-San Marcos, and his Ph.D. in history from Stony Brook University-New York. His research interests include the histories of slavery, resistance, and freedom in the Black Atlantic, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to slavery within popular culture and media. He teaches courses on the UCONN campus ranging from African American History to 1865, Comparative Slavery in the Americas, and Slavery in Film—to name a few. His most recent published book, Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism, explores British Emancipation in the Anglo-Caribbean and its impact on abolitionist strategies in the nineteenth-century United States.

He is jointly-appointed faculty with the Africana Studies Institute.

Publications

Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, April 2023.

“Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (1902): Antiracism and the Counternarrative of the Black Fantastic,” In Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2022.

“The British Emigration Scheme and African American Emigration to the Caribbean,” In In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, ed. Ronald Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021

“Envisaging Freedom on the Eve of Emancipation: The British Caribbean, 1833-1834.” Readex Report 14 (2019).

“Django Unchained: Quentin Tarantino and the History of the Southern” In Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas Through Film, ed. Rudyard Alcocer and Kristen Block. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018.

“Translating Trump Through A Brief History of Black America.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 21, no. 5 (December 2017): 507-511.

Recent Awards

University of Connecticut Humanities Institute Fellowship (2018-2019)

Benjamin F. Stevens Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society (2018)

Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society (2017)