Rate My Professor Kristen Block

Kristen Block is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She serves as Chair of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies interdisciplinary program and is affiliated with the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Block received her Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University in 2007, with fields of study in the Early Modern Atlantic World and Women's and Gender History, and her B.A. in History and Creative Writing from Beloit College in 1998. An expert in the history of the Atlantic World, her research primarily focuses on the Caribbean and the effects of colonial competition in the early modern Americas. She investigates how religion and slavery influenced life in colonial America, particularly through interactions among Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans that established social rules and norms. Block's scholarship emphasizes multilingual and inter-imperial entanglements in the early circum-Caribbean, exploring the intersections of mind, body, and spirit, and the methodological challenges in recovering the experiences of marginalized groups such as women, the lower classes, and enslaved people.

Block authored Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2012. She co-edited Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film with Rudyard J. Alcocer and Dawn Duke, issued by the University of Tennessee Press in 2018. Her peer-reviewed articles include "Remedios for Relationships: Social Precarity and Amatory Therapeutics in the Early Circum-Caribbean" in the Hispanic American Historical Review (2024), "Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean" in Past and Present (2011), "Slavery and Inter-Imperial Leprosy Discourse in the Atlantic World" in Atlantic Studies (2017), and "Cultivating Inner and Outer Plantations: Property, Industry, and Slavery in Early Quaker Migration to the New World" in Early American Studies (2010). Block has earned major awards and fellowships, including residential research fellowships from the Huntington Library and the 2024-2025 Faculty Fellowship from UT Knoxville's Denbo Center for the Humanities and the Arts for her ongoing project on desire, corruption, and healing in early Caribbean transcultural encounters. Through her publications and research, Block significantly influences the fields of Atlantic and Caribbean history.