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Staff Profiles

Dr Christina Mobley

Lecturer in History

Background

Dr Mobley is a Lecturer in the History of Radical Ideas in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology where she served as Decolonising the Curriculum Coordinator in 2019-21. She also served on the Racial Equality Charter Steering Committee, the Vice-Chancellor’s Review Group on Lord Armstrong’s Legacy, and gave a series of workshops on Decolonizing the Curriculum to the university community.

Dr. Mobley is an historian of Africa, the Caribbean, and Atlantic slavery. Her research employs interdisciplinary methodologies including historical linguistics, oral history, and the digital humanities to go beyond the silences in the archive and recover diverse historical voices and histories. Her research has won funding from the Fulbright Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Social Science Research Council, among others.

As an historian of African and the Caribbean, she is committed to promoting participation in higher education among people of colour and other socially and neurologically diverse groups. As Decolonising the Curriculum Coordinator, Dr. Mobley work closely with students to diversify the curriculum, introducing modules on the history of slavery and Africa. She also coordinated the introduction of the faculty’s first interdisciplinary modules which sought to promote inclusion through geographical, chronological, and methodologically diversity.

Dr Mobley is an experienced digital humanist and public historian, reflecting her broader interest in the way that digital humanities technologies can be a tool to redress the inequalities in the global political economy of knowledge. In 2021, she created a documentary about slavery in South Carolina for the Foundling Museum exhibit “Fighting Talk,” curated by Prof Helen Berry. As co-director of the Mellon-funded Global South Humanities Lab, she oversaw the introduction of the first digital humanities capstone projects. At Duke University, she worked in the Haiti Lab, overseeing projects such as the Haiti Digital Library and Haiti: History Embedded in Amber.

 Prior to joining Newcastle Uni, Dr. Mobley held the position of Assistant Professor in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, where she was the founding co-director of UVA's first humanities laboratory, the Mellon-funded "Global South: Concept and Practice."

Research

I am a scholar of Africa and the Caribbean as well as a committed digital humanist. As a historian of slavery, I am particularly interested how methodologies such as historical linguistics and oral history make it possible to go beyond the silences in the archives and recover diverse histories.


In my current book project, Vodou History: from the Kongo to the Haitian Revolution, I investigate the trans-Atlantic history of the Kongo men, women, and children who endured slavery in Saint Domingue, helped win the most successful slave revolution in history – the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) – and founded the first black republic, Haiti. 


I am also interested in interdisciplinary, collaborative projects that help address major challenges facing marginalised populations. At UVA, I was co-principal investigator with Dr. Sally Pusede (Environmental Science) on a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project that used digital humanities and data science tools to investigate the historical drivers of the greatest public health problems facing Africa’s urban dwellers: air pollution. Using Dakar, Senegal as a case study, we explored the impact of colonialism, tracing the way colonial policies of urban planning and segregation contribute to present-day air pollution. Our research won support from the Environmental Resilience Institute and the Committee on Sustainability.

 

My research has won support from the Mellon Foundation (2017-18), the Center for Global Inquiry an Innovation at Uva (2016), the American Council of Learned Societies (2015-16 declined), the Social Science Research Council (2012-13), Fulbright Fellowship (2012-13), US Department of Education (FLAS, Haitian Kreyol, 2010-11), and Duke University Graduate School (James B. Duke Fellowship, 2012-13).

Teaching

HCA1001: Slavery (ML)

HCA1002: Big History

HIS2027: Africa: History of a Continent (ML)

HIS3348: The Haitian Revolution (ML)

HIS3000: Reading History

Publications