Reena Goldthree | “The Spirit of Unrest": Veterans' Politics, Racial Panics, and the Limits of Inclusion in the Greater Caribbean

Reena Goldthree

Associate Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS), AY26

Princeton University, Department of African American Studies

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 fellowships and grants from the American Historical Association, Coordinating Council for Women in History, Ford Foundation, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright. Professor Goldthree is a former chair of the Caribbean Studies Section of the Conference on Latin American History and has also served on the executive board of the Coordinating Council for Women in History.