WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

Reena Goldthree

Reena Goldthree is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and is also associated faculty in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Program in Latin American Studies. She is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean, with particular interests in the history of social movements, labor and migration, and Caribbean feminism. At Princeton, she teaches courses that examine Caribbean, Latin American, and Afro-Latino/x histories from the colonial period to the present. She earned her B.A. in History-Sociology (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Duke University.

Professor Goldthree is the author of Democracy’s Foot Soldiers: World War I and the Politics of Empire in the Greater Caribbean (Princeton University Press, 2025). Drawing on archival sources from the Caribbean, England, and United States, the book reveals how the crisis of World War I transformed Afro-Caribbeans’ understanding of, and engagements with, the British Empire. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, The American Historian, and Radical Teacher. She is the co-editor of a special issue of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies on gender and anti-colonialism in the interwar Caribbean (December 2018). She has also published peer-reviewed essays in New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2018), Caribbean Military Encounters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Teaching American Studies (University of Kansas Press, 2021), and Global Circuits of Blackness: Interrogating the African Diasporas (University of Illinois Press, 2010). Her research has been supported by the American Historical Association, Coordinating Council for Women in History, Ford Foundation, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright.

Institutional Affiliation:

Princeton University


Session

06-27
10:15
90min
Plenary: Moving Labor, Making Worlds: Migration, Empire, and Diaspora
Bin Yang, Reena Goldthree, Zou Kunyi, Pedro Machado, Ryuto Shimada, Sheng Fei, Ming Zhu

How did mobile workers shape the modern world order? This plenary asks historians to explain the intertwined histories of labor migration and diaspora across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean, highlighting how workers moved through imperial systems, commercial circuits, and diasporic communities and how labor migration stimulated new social formations, political movements, and transregional connections that reshaped the modern world.

Room 106 (Seats 105)