Catherine Peters

Catherine (Catie) Peters is a Postdoctoral Associate in Yale’s Program in Agrarian Studies. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies with a secondary field in Latinx Studies from Harvard University. Catie is an interdisciplinary historian whose work is concerned with empire, race, gender, sexuality, intimacy, capitalism, and the environment. Her book project, A Free Race of Cultivators: Afro-Asian Histories, Ecologies, and Intimacies, draws together the Indian and Atlantic Oceans while also arguing for the Haitian Revolution as a catalyst in the conscription of Chinese and Indian migrants to the early nineteenth-century Caribbean. Writing against traditional historical frames, which naturalize the “replacement” of indentured individuals for enslaved people, the study situates people of Asian and African descent within the same historical frame to demonstrate how imperial projects joined their histories together. As a dissertation, the project drew upon over fifteen months of archival work in the United Kingdom, Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Spain, France, and the United States. Catie has a forthcoming essay on “intimacies as method” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She has also published in the pages of Environmental History, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, and Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts. Her work has been supported by many fellowships, including the John Carter Brown Library, American Antiquarian Society, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and numerous centers at Harvard University. While at Yale, Catie will continue work on a project that links the development of sustainable agriculture via empire in Asia and settler colonialism in the United States.