Alycia Hall

Academic Year: 
2022-23
Direction: 
From Yale
Exchange Partners: 
Cambridge University
Project Title: 
"Strategic Ties: Family, Land, and Plantation Connections in Maroon Jamaica”

Alycia Hall is a Ph.D. candidate in African American Studies and History. She has been researching the history of Jamaica, focusing in particular on the Afro-descended Maroon communities that populated the mountainous regions throughout the island from the seventeenth century to the present. In particular she is interested in understanding how these communities navigated a changing social, political, and economic world as Jamaica transitioned from slavery to free labor. Her dissertation will examine the community formation of the five Jamaican Maroon communities and their interactions with other people and groups in Jamaica from the Second Maroon War of the1790s to the 1890s. She is interested in examining the relationships between the five Maroon communities who were granted peace treaties to other rebel communities, enslaved people on the island, local planters, and the colonial state. Her dissertation will delve into the Maroons understanding of their status, mainly in relation to other black people on the island both pre- and post- island-wide emancipation in 1834. Further, her research seeks to extend the history of these communities into the 1890s in order to understand the ways in which Maroons continued to actively attempt to command their place in Jamaican society.