Ruma Chopra is a historian interested in the interactions between climatic theories and European colonization projects during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published three scholarly books dealing with the themes of loyalty, exile, and home. She has worked extensively with primary archives in Britain, Jamaica, Trinidad, Sierra Leone, India, as well as in various collections in the United States. She has received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen) and the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington D.C.).
RCC Research Project: Between God and Darwin: Early Modern Transitions in the Understanding of Climate
Selected Publications:
- Almost Home: Maroons Between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
- “Rethinking the Historiography of Coolie Integration in British Caribbean Cities,” MMG Working Paper 19-01 (Göttingen, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, 2019).
- “The Royalist Maroons of Jamaica in the British Atlantic World, 1740-1800,” in Varia História (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2019).
- “Maroons and Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, 1796-1800” in Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region XLVI, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2017): 5-23.
- Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2013.
- Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.