Brooke N. Newman, an associate professor in the department of history in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University, has won a 2019 Independent Publisher Book Award for her book A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale University Press, 2018). The awards are intended to bring increased recognition to the thousands of exemplary independent, university, and self-published titles published each year.
Dr. Newman’s book won the gold medal in the category of world history. Examining 18th-century Jamaica, the book shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified hereditary African slavery and barred members of marginalized groups from claiming the inherited rights of British subjects.
In addition to teaching, Dr. Newman also serves as the associate director of the Humanities Research Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a scholar of early modern British history and the British Atlantic, with a focus on the colonial Caribbean. Her research and teaching interests include slavery and abolition, empire and national identity, the British monarchy, and intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in Britain and the British Empire.
Dr. Newman is a graduate of Texas State University where she double majored in history and English. She holds a Ph.D. in early modern Britain and the British Atlantic from the University of California, Davis.