Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy

• Research interests: Caribbean, Atlantic World, and vast early Americas; disability, madness, health, and medicine; slavery and emancipation; race, gender, and sexuality; legal history

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy is an award-winning historian whose research focuses on disability and slavery and the intersecting histories of gender, race, and class in the British Caribbean and Atlantic World. A leading question that drives her research is how does colonialism challenge the way we think about disability? Hunt-Kennedy’s first book, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020), analyzes the relationship between disability, antiblack racism, and slavery in the sugar-producing colonies of the British Caribbean from the 16th century to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. She argues that disability was a defining feature of slavery’s violence and the antiblack racism that undergirded it. Drawing on European travelogues, laws that governed slavery, plantation records, runaway advertisements, and abolitionist and proslavery rhetoric, Hunt-Kennedy illustrates that disability was a factor that shaped both the lives of the enslaved as well as the meanings of enslavement.

Between Fitness and Death won the 2021 Disability History Association Outstanding Book Award. Hunt-Kennedy’s article, “‘Had his nose cropt for being formerly runaway:’ Disability and the Bodies of Fugitive Slaves in the British Caribbean,” (Slavery & Abolition 41:2 (2020), 212-233) received the 2021 Disability History Association Outstanding Journal Article Award, making her the first person to win both DHA awards. Her article, “’Had his nose cropt,’” also received Honourable Mention for the Andrés Ramon Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize in recognition of excellence in the field of Caribbean History, 2020.

Dr. Hunt-Kennedy is the creator and primary investigator of The Laws of Enslavement and Freedom in the Anglo-Atlantic World, a SSHRC-funded open-access digital archive of the laws governing slavery and emancipation in the Anglo-Atlantic World, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. She is also co-editor (with Dr. Jenifer Barclay, University at Buffalo) of Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power (University of Illinois Press, 2025), an edited collection of interdisciplinary scholarship that analyzes the ways that ableism, racism, and other forms of inequality and injustice are institutionalized and reproduced in the archive.

Professor Hunt-Kennedy’s second book project, Slavery and the Making of Poverty in the Age of Emancipation, explores the intersections between disability, poverty, and the development of social welfare in the transition from slavery to freedom in the British Caribbean. She is also working on a project that brings her from Disability History to an adjacent field – Mad Studies – and geographically to the local. Re-Storying Early Mad History: A Disability History of the St. John Lunatic Asylum explores the early years of Canada’s first asylum.

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy is a Series Editor for the University of Illinois Press’s Disability Histories Series. She also serves on the Council for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and on the Editorial Board for the William & Mary Quarterly. Professor Hunt-Kennedy is also Director of Publications for the Disability History Association (DHA) and Executive Editor of All of Us, the DHA’s publication.

Education

• PhD, University of Toronto, 2015
• MA, University of Guelph, 2009
• BA, Trent University, 2008

Representative publications

Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Winner of the 2021 Disability History Association Outstanding Book Award.

“’Had it not been for her:” Disability, Gender, and Care Labor in the Age of Amelioration,” Gender & History 00: 1–15.

“Defining Poverty,” in A Cultural History of Poverty at the Dawn of the World Economy (1450 –1650) (Bloomsbury Publishing, accepted & forthcoming Fall 2023).

“Disability in the Archive of Slavery,” in Early Modern Medicine: A Source Centered Introduction edited by Olivia Weisser (Routledge Press, accepted & forthcoming, Fall 2023).

“Disability, the Middle Passage, and the Plantation: Slavery-Induced Disability in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” Disability Histories: Local, Global and Colonial Stories (edited by Esme Cleall) (Routledge University Press, 2023).

“Silence, Violence, and the Archive of Slavery,” English Language Notes, (59.1, April 2021): 222-224.

“‘Had his nose cropt for being formerly runaway:” Disability and the Bodies of Fugitive Slaves in the British Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 41:2 (2020), 212-233. Winner of the Disability History Association’s Outstanding Journal Article 2021; Honourable Mention for the Andrés Ramon Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize in recognition of excellence in the field of Caribbean history.

“The Haunting of Slavery: Colonialism and the Disabled Body in the Caribbean,” with Melanie J. Newton in Disability in the Global South: the Critical Handbook, eds. Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2016), 379-391.

“Let them be young and stoutly set in limbs:” Race, Labor, and Disability in the British Atlantic World,” Social Identities Special Issue: Disability and Colonialism: (Dis)encounters and Anxious Intersectionalities 21, no. 1 (2015), 37-52. Reprinted in Routledge Historical Resources: 19th Century Empire.