David Barry Gaspar

David Barry Gaspar (1945 -)

Barry Gaspar is currently professor of history at Duke University, USA.

Barry was born and raised in Saint Lucia in the West Indies, and is a graduate of the College (now University) of the Virgin Islands, the University of the West Indies, and the Johns Hopkins University where he earned the PhD degree in history studying under Professor Jack P. Greene in 1974.

"I first ran into Jack Greene when he was on vacation in Barbados, where I had been an undergrad at the University of the West Indies. At that point I was planning to go to the University of Florida to do my graduate studies in Caribbean history. But Jack talked to me about the history program at Hopkins, and his particular interest in the history of the Atlantic basin, and I realized he was the ideal person to work with."

Barry has taught at the University of the West Indies, the University of Virginia (1979), Michigan State University.

His research and teaching interests include: Atlantic History and Culture; the Colonial Americas; Caribbean History and Culture; Comparative Slave Systems; the Atlantic Slave Trade; History, Society, and Catastrophe; Maritime History.

He is the author of "Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua", published in 1985; and more recently he co-edited with Professor Darlene Clark Hine, "Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas", published in 2004.

One of Professor Gaspar's current research projects is a study of the emigration of liberated Africans to the British Leeward and Windward Islands of the Eastern Caribbean after emancipation when various immigration schemes emerged in those colonies.