Heather Vermeulen
Heather Vermeulen’s research and teaching focuses on transatlantic slavery and its afterlives, ecology, literature and arts of the African Diaspora, and gender and sexuality studies.
Biography
Vermeulen received her doctorate in African American Studies and American Studies (with a Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) from Yale University. Her current research relates eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival documents from British colonial Jamaica to literature and arts of the African Diaspora, with a focus on slavery, ecology, and kinship. Vermeulen has received fellowships from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, MacMillan Center for International & Area Studies, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, & Abolition, Lewis Walpole Library, and Fund for Lesbian & Gay Studies. Her essay “Mortal Coils and Hair-Raising Revolutions: Styling ‘Race’ in the Age of Enlightenment” will appear in A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Enlightenment, 1650-1800 (Bloomsbury), edited by Joseph Roach and Margaret Powell. Vermeulen was a visiting faculty member at Bennington for Spring 2018.