from the University College of the West Indies, followed by an MSc and PhD, and has received a predoctoral fellowship in psychiatric anthropology.

[1] During Brodber's time working at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies, she collected several oral histories of elderly people's lives in rural Jamaica, which inspired her novel, Louisiana.

Brodber--trained as a sociologist with a Ph.D. and several publications on Jamaican society--emphasizes non-western forms of understanding in her fiction, deconstructing the historical methodologies of colonialist knowledge.

She works to challenge western ways of ordering the world, and to resurrect myth and tradition as a form of historical rehabilitation from the psychic damage of slavery and colonialism.

She weaves fantastical, non-realist elements with traditional modes of story-telling--emphasizing both as crucial to the psychic make-up of her characters and the world around them.