It is with deep sadness that we recognize the passing of Prof. Trevor Burnard from cancer at the age of 64. Trevor was the Research Professor in Slavery and Emancipation and Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull, UK. He was an esteemed scholar of African, American, Atlantic, and Caribbean Histories who made remarkable contributions to the study of Jamaican Slavery. Among his many important works is his book Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004). He was also a kind and generous person who created a celebrated body of academic and public-facing scholarship which will doubtlessly have an enduring impact on scholars and students for generations.
When I began the journey of building Slavery North, Trevor immediately agreed to serve on my Advisory Board. I first met Trevor when I was a visiting professor at Harvard. In April 2018, he accepted my invitation to participate in a workshop on slave resistance. His workshop presentation became his book chapter “Thomas Thistlewood and the problem of Petit Marronnage in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica” which is a part of my edited book The Precariousness of Freedom: Slave Resistance as Experience, Process, and Representation (Concord, Ontario: Captus Press, forthcoming August 2024). Sadly, Trevor did not live to see this work in print.
When I left a celebrated research professorship in Canada after suffering abuse, Trevor was one of the few people who reached out to me with words of kindness, wisdom, and encouragement. He let me know that I was not alone, and it meant the world to me. I know that many people also keenly feel the loss of his intelligence, graciousness, guidance, compassion, good humour, and his example of a public intellectual of the highest order. We will miss you, Trevor. Rest in peace.
