Chelsey Smith Joins Department of History as Public Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow

Story by Heather Gernenz. View original piece, published October 1, 2024.

This fall, the Department of History is excited to welcome Chelsey Smith as a public humanities post-doctoral fellow. Smith is a historian of nineteenth-century Jamaican history and her research interests include education, race, and labor in the Caribbean and Latin America.

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Chelsey Smith

The College of LAS Public Humanities Fellow program is a unique opportunity for Smith to pursue a public engagement project with the Humanities Research Institute. During the post-doc, Smith hopes to explore a community digital history project, write an article, and start revising her dissertation into her first book. In year two, she will become an assistant professor in the Department of History. For Smith, History at Illinois felt like the “perfect fit” and she was impressed by the mentorship and resources we provide to junior faculty members. On her first visit to campus, she was charmed by the similarities between Champaign-Urbana and her hometown in Arkansas. The decision to begin her career at Illinois was a “no-brainer.” 

Smith’s dissertation uses education as a lens to understand the lives of Afro-Jamaicans in the first decades after abolition as they navigated obtaining land, voting, and citizenship rights. She examines the role of British-funded missionary schools for both children and adults, and how the missionaries acted as what she calls partial allies to free people. She charts how education created opportunities for Afro-Jamaicans but also was a tool the British empire used to control formerly enslaved people. 

Her first article, “What is for me is not for my Master,” focusing on land and labor in the apprenticeship period in Jamaica was recently published in the New West Indian Guide. This year, she is considering writing an article that compares the narratives of two Black women in the nineteenth century: The History of Mary Prince and A Narrative of The Life and Travels of Ms. Nancy Prince. Mary Prince’s book was the first narrative by an enslaved person published in Britain and had a large impact on their abolition movement. Nancy Prince was a free Black American woman who wrote about her travels to Russia and Jamaica in the 1850s. Smith is fascinated by their stories and thinks she can use them to explore connections between Black Internationalism and Black Atlantic World scholarship. The idea grew out of a paper on Mary Prince that she wrote for a women, gender, and Black Internationalism class at the University of Pittsburgh taught by professor Keisha N. Blain. Blain encouraged Smith to explore comparing Mary Prince’s story to another Black person’s narrative from the period.  

Mentorship has played a key role in Smith’s career and the mentors she’s had throughout her life guided her on her path to becoming a historian. Her earliest memories are of bonding with her father while watching documentaries.  

“It all started really with that love I had for history and bonding with my father over it,” she said, “And then just letting it take me where I wanted to go, but it really helped just meeting professors along the way who saw my passion and just nurtured that.” 

When she becomes an assistant professor next year, she’s looking forward to teaching Caribbean history and serving as a mentor to her students.  

“I really like being in that position of helping students and helping them figure out, you know, their research goals and different paths they can take. So I'm excited about that,” she said. 

She hopes to teach students about the U.S.’s involvement in the region, the importance of the Caribbean in world history, and that it’s more than just a vacation spot.  

“I have a lot of students who say I've always wondered why things are the way they are today and when they come out of the class, they have so much historical context to help explain things that they just didn't understand in the news,” she said. “It just helps things make more sense to them and gives them context for even things they learned in U.S. history.” 

Smith is part of a postdoc-to-faculty initiative bringing scholars in public humanities and arts to Illinois. The initiative is a collaboration among the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College Fine and Applied Arts, and HRI.