Verene A. Shepherd, Professor of Social History at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society (FCCS), and host of Nationwide 90 FM’s “Talking History”, is the new University Director of the Institute for Gender & Development Studies (IGDS), with oversight responsibility for the Mona, Cave Hill and St. Augustine Units of the IGDS. She holds the BA and MPhil degrees in History from the University of the West Indies and the PhD in History from the University of Cambridge.   She is a Board Member of the Association for the Study of the World-Wide African Diaspora (ASWAD), Steering Committee Member of the South-South Exchange Programme for the History of Development (SEPHIS), member of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent and a member of the International Women’s Federation.

In 1999 she served as Facilitator of the National Consultation on Social Infrastructure of Jamaica. She has also served as Network Professor with the York/UNESCO Nigerian Hinterland, is the Immediate Past President of the Association of Caribbean Historians, and was the first woman to Chair the Board of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust. In 2007 she was appointed Chair of the Jamaica National Bicentenary Committee.
Professor Shepherd has had a long history with the Institute for Gender and Development Studies. She was one of the founding members of the Women and Development Studies Group, which assisted in the institutionalisation of the IGDS and also served from 1996 to 1998 on the Gender and Development Studies Board as the representative of the Faculty of Arts & Education (now Humanities and Education) where she initiated the idea of the Lucille Mathurin-Mair lecture series. Professor Shepherd also taught courses on women and gender in Caribbean history and supervised graduate theses at both the Master’s and Doctoral levels on women and gender. 

A prolific author, Prof. Shepherd is editor/compiler of Women in Caribbean History, co-editor of Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (with Barbara Bailey and Bridget Brereton) and editor of Engendering Caribbean History: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (forthcoming, 2010).  Among her other publications are Livestock, Sugar & Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica (2009), I Want to Disturb My Neighbour: Lectures on Slavery, Emancipation and Post-Colonial Jamaica (2007) and Maharani’s Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India to the Caribbean (2002).

Professor Shepherd will assume her new position as University Director of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies on August 1, 2010, in succession to Professor Barbara Bailey who headed the IGDS for the past 14 years.