Verene A. Shepherd, a member of the Planning Committee for the 2003 Mona Academic Conference, is Professor of Social History at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. She holds the B.A. and M.Phil. degrees in History from the UWI and the PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. She is a Board Member of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, a member of the Executive Committee of the Jamaican Historical Society and the Association of Caribbean Historians and co-director of the Mona Institute of Caribbean Studies’ Text and Testimony Collective. Professor Shepherd’s research interests are Jamaican Economic History (especially the history of non-sugar activities); Slavery and its Legacies in the Caribbean, Asian Migration and Settlement in the Caribbean, Inter-Ethnic relations in Caribbean societies and Caribbean Women’s historical experiences; and she has published widely on these themes.

She is the author of Transients to settlers: the experience of Indians in Jamaica, 1845-1950 (University of Warwick & Peepal Tree Press, 1994) and Maharani’s Misery: narratives of a passage from India to the Caribbean (The Press, UWI, 2002). She compiled Women in Caribbean History (Ian Randle, I999) and edited Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African diaspora (Ian Randle, 2002) and Slavery without Sugar: diversity in Caribbean economy and society since the 17th century (University Press of Florida, 2002).