Researching 17th century Caribbean freedom and empire | Penn Today
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Archived: 2026-04-23 17:15
Researching 17th century Caribbean freedom and empire | Penn Today
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Clifton E. Sorrell III is an Advisory Council Fellow at the
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
(MCEAS). As a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin, his research examines how Africans and their descendants shaped the jurisdictional landscape of freedom and empire in the early Caribbean during the long seventeenth century. At Penn, he is conducting research for his dissertation, “At the heart of the Caribbean: Freedom, Empire and Sovereignty in Spanish Jamaica and Greater Antilles, 1530-1690.”
View large image
Clifton E. Sorrell III is a McNeil Center for Early American Studies Advisory Council Fellow.
(Image: Courtesy of McNeil Center for Early American History)
“I first became interested in my topic during my junior year as an undergraduate student in a graduate-student research mentorship program,” says Sorrell. “At the time, I was broadly interested in histories of Black enslaved freedom struggle and community formation. As part of the program, my graduate student mentor introduced me to digitized primary sources dealing with eighteenth-century Jamaica. That experience set the tone for what I wanted to study in graduate school.”
“My second year in graduate school, however, really reshaped the trajectory of my current research interests. I presented a paper at an MCEAS symposium celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Richard Dunn’s Sugar and Slavery that explored maroon fugitive geographies during the English conquest of Spanish Jamaica. Working with a limited set of published transcriptions left me with more questions about the islands’ enslaved and maroon communities before the conquest. These unanswered questions, in light of the sparse scholarship on Spanish colonial Jamaica, shifted my focus to enslaved and maroon communities in the early Spanish Caribbean.”
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The McNeil Center
.
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Skip to Content
Skip to Content
News from
University of Pennsylvania
Try Advanced Search
Clifton E. Sorrell III is an Advisory Council Fellow at the
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
(MCEAS). As a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin, his research examines how Africans and their descendants shaped the jurisdictional landscape of freedom and empire in the early Caribbean during the long seventeenth century. At Penn, he is conducting research for his dissertation, “At the heart of the Caribbean: Freedom, Empire and Sovereignty in Spanish Jamaica and Greater Antilles, 1530-1690.”
View large image
Clifton E. Sorrell III is a McNeil Center for Early American Studies Advisory Council Fellow.
(Image: Courtesy of McNeil Center for Early American History)
“I first became interested in my topic during my junior year as an undergraduate student in a graduate-student research mentorship program,” says Sorrell. “At the time, I was broadly interested in histories of Black enslaved freedom struggle and community formation. As part of the program, my graduate student mentor introduced me to digitized primary sources dealing with eighteenth-century Jamaica. That experience set the tone for what I wanted to study in graduate school.”
“My second year in graduate school, however, really reshaped the trajectory of my current research interests. I presented a paper at an MCEAS symposium celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Richard Dunn’s Sugar and Slavery that explored maroon fugitive geographies during the English conquest of Spanish Jamaica. Working with a limited set of published transcriptions left me with more questions about the islands’ enslaved and maroon communities before the conquest. These unanswered questions, in light of the sparse scholarship on Spanish colonial Jamaica, shifted my focus to enslaved and maroon communities in the early Spanish Caribbean.”
Read more at
The McNeil Center
.
Share this article
Threads
Credits
Writer
From The McNeil Center for Early American Studies
More from
School of Arts & Sciences
Graduate Students
History
Novel plant-based approach to a better, cheaper GLP-1 delivery system
Health & Medicine
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Research led by Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell investigates the use of a lettuce-based, plant-encapsulated delivery platform as a new oral delivery of two GLP-1 drugs previously approved by the FDA in injectable form.
No brain, no gain: Neuronal activity enhances benefits of exercise
Image: Sciepro/Science Photo Library via Getty Images
Natural Sciences
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Research led by Penn neuroscientist J. Nicholas Betley and collaborators finds that hypothalamic neurons are essential for translating physical exertion into endurance, potentially opening the door to exercise-mimicking therapies.
Studying Shakespeare through the lens of love
In honor of Valentine's Day, and as a way of fostering community in her Shakespeare in Love course, Becky Friedman took her students to the University Club for lunch one class period. They talked about the movie "Shakespeare in Love," as part of a broader conversation on how Shakespeare's works are adapted.
nocred
Arts & Humanities
Studying Shakespeare through the lens of love
In Becky Friedman’s English course Shakespeare in Love, undergraduate students analyze language, genre, and adaptation in the Bard’s plays through the lens of love.
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nocred
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Dorit Aviv, director of Weitzman’s Thermal Architecture Lab, studies how humans, technology, and design intersect, paving the way for the development of novel approaches to cooling people efficiently.