Rate My Professor Steeve Buckridge

Steeve Buckridge is a Professor of History at Grand Valley State University, where he joined the faculty in 1998. Specializing in African and Caribbean history, he teaches courses in these areas and serves as Director of the Namibia Study Abroad program in the Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies. From 2011 to 2018, he was the Inaugural Director of Area and Global Studies. Buckridge is also a core faculty member in the African and African American Studies program and an Honors Associate faculty member in the Frederick Meijer Honors College. He earned his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1998, M.A. from the University of Miami in 1993, and B.A. from Barry University in 1990. His career includes visiting appointments such as Professor at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana; Visiting Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art in January 2014; Ford Foundation Fellow at the University of the West Indies in 2002-2003; and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Namibia in 2022.

Buckridge's research interests encompass Pre-Colonial and Colonial Africa, British Caribbean and Slavery, Gender and Sexuality, Clothing as Material Culture, and Costume and Fashion Studies. He has conducted research in various African countries on customs in dress, textiles, and weaving techniques, and has published and presented numerous papers on dress practices among Caribbean enslaved people. His scholarship is interdisciplinary, exploring dynamics of race, class, and gender. Key publications include The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica 1760-1890 (University of the West Indies Press, 2004), which investigates how enslaved and freedwomen used fashion and dress to resist slavery and accommodate white culture in pre- and post-emancipation Jamaica; and African Lace-bark in the Caribbean: The Construction of Race, Class and Gender (Bloomsbury Press, 2016), which examines the production of lace-bark by African women and its role in Jamaica's history and culture. He has received several research grants and fellowships, including the Ford Foundation Fellowship and the Fulbright Scholars Award.