Dr Grace Turner has research interests in the history and culture of The Bahamas and the Caribbean. She worked for a time in the Museum and Archaeology Section of the Department of Archives in Nassau. She is currently with the Antiquities, Monuments and Museum Corporation in Nassau.
Grace is editor of the Journal of the Bahamas Historical Society. She has published several articles on Bahamian history in the Journal of the Bahamas Historical Society and the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. Her book, Honoring Ancestors in Sacred Space: The Archaeology of an Eighteenth-Century African-Bahamian Cemetery was published in November 2017 by the University Press of Florida. The research for this book is based on the excavation of a forgotten cemetery site in Nassau, which was the project for her doctoral dissertation.
CaribOx Project Officer Helena Neimann Erikstrup interviewed her about her plans for the duration of the fellowship.
What are you most looking forward to doing in Oxford?
For my time in Oxford I am looking forward to interactions with colleagues at Oxford, and conducting research into documents that are not accessible to me in The Bahamas.
I will be searching for more details on the daily lives of early historic period populations in The Bahamas. This information is to provide greater context for the lab analysis of skeletal remains of past European and African populations in The Bahamas. This collaborative research has the potential to expand our current knowledge of how these early populations managed to survive in the beautiful but harsh environment of the Bahama Islands.
This visiting fellowship has only reinforced for me the significance of collaborative work with international and local colleagues.
For more updates about CaribOx, keep your eye out on this space.
