Adrian van der Velde

I am a PhD candidate in early modern Atlantic World and European history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My dissertation, entitled “When Unwelcome Night Came,” examines the role of nocturnality in the British, Dutch, and French Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Via the categories of mobility, religion, sociability, technology and production, and violence, my work employs a cultural methodology to explore the ways that people discussed and experienced the night and applies it as a lens to see the way that marginalized people—especially the enslaved—could use it to resist colonial authority.