Ryan Fontanilla

Ryan Fontanilla is a History PhD candidate at Harvard, studying the environmental and cultural history of the African diaspora in the Americas, particularly Jamaica. His dissertation project, “Stealing Freedom: Water, Death, and Power in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, ca. 1820-1900,” examines how Black freedom struggles for open access to unoccupied land and water resources decisively influenced the process and long-term outcomes of the abolition of racial slavery in the British empire’s largest and deadliest sugar colony in 1838. It argues that, after Emancipation, people of African descent countered the caloric, water, and monetary terrorism of white planters by using their knowledge of the built environment to settle and defend precious spaces of refuge and human flourishing on some of the most secluded drought-resistant and drought-prone frontiers of the colony. The harrowing story of their victories and defeats in the face of multi-year droughts and state-sponsored and vigilante violence prefigured the experiences of modern-day refugees of climate change and war in the Caribbean. Before coming to Harvard, Ryan received an MA in History from George Washington University in 2016 and a BA in History from George Mason University in 2012. In a past life, he sailed the Caribbean as a member of the US Coast Guard, an experience described in Boston Review