Jean Besson

Biography

Emeritus Professor Professor Besson has served on the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and as chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies in the UK, of which she is a founder member (1977) and (since 2010) an elected Honorary Life Member. She was a founding co-editor of the journal Progress in Development Studies (London: Arnold) and continues as a Life Member of the PIDs Advisory Board. She has been an advisor to the Scottish Executive on census issues of ethnicity (2007) and a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum for the Exhibition ‘Breaking the Chains’ (2007-2009) commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade. She is an Associate Fellow of the Instituteof Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and of the Institute of the Americas, University College London.

Research Interest

Professor Jean Besson has carried out research in Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean, publishing on cultural history, peasantries (free villages, informal occupiers and maroons), land, law, development, kinship, gender, narratives, religion, migration and ethnicity. Her publications include Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Caribbean Narratives of Belonging: Fields of Relations, Sites of Identity, edited with Karen Fog Olwig (Oxford: Macmillan, 2005); Caribbean Land and Development Revisited, edited with Janet Momsen (New York: Palgrave, 2007); and Transformations of Freedom in the Land of the Maroons: Creolization in the Cockpits, Jamaica (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2016). She is currently writing an ethnography based on long-term fieldwork among informal occupiers in a Jamaican ‘squatter’ settlement.