Jessica Krug

Jessica Krug, a Ph.D. student in African and African Diaspora history, has worked on various projects documenting the history of Maroons (descendents of enslaved Africans who fled the plantations and fought for their freedom) in Jamaica and Suriname. After researching the Caribbean aspect of these histories, including writing her M.A. about the development of nationalist ideology amongst the Maroons of eighteenth-century Jamaica, she turned her attention to the African antecedents to maroonage in the Americas. Realizing that Maroon communities in fact existed in Angola as early as the sixteenth century, she is seeking to understand the intellectual history of resistance to enslavement in Angola, São Tomé, and Brazil. Krug’s studies have been supported by FLAS Fellowships, the Advanced Opportunity Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, and the Jan Vansina Travel Fund. This summer, she will travel to Angola to investigate the historical memory of Kisama communities who are descended from those who fled enslavement in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.