Linda Sturtz

Linda Sturtz’s work examines the history of early North America and the British Caribbean within an Atlantic world context.  She has taught courses on the early modern Atlantic world, music as history and public history.

Prior to coming to Macalester, she taught at Beloit College and in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest Newberry Library Program.  She once worked as a Park Ranger at Colonial National Historical Park.  Her first book, Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia (Routledge, 2002) took a longue-durée approach to understanding the ways that law and transatlantic trade shaped the opportunities of women. Her current research focuses on the ways that African-Caribbean women sought to cultivate an expressive culture within a slave society and into how their tactics adapted to new forms of social control in the aftermath of abolition.