Selwyn Cudjoe (born 1 December 1943)[1] is a Trinidadian academic, scholar, historian, essayist and editor who is Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College.
[2] Selwyn Reginald Cudjoe was born in Tacarigua, Trinidad and Tobago, like several generations of his family,[4][5] growing up on a sugar estate on which ancestors of his had worked.
Cudjoe's 2018 book, The Slavemaster of Trinidad: William Hardin Burnley and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, is described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr as a "beautifully written and meticulously researched account of Burnley's life" that "unfolds the story of a planter who was born in America, educated in England, and made his fortune in the Caribbean.
Measured in tone, this book not only exposes Burnley's public and private racism, but also places his life in context of the greater historical currents of the first half of the 19th century Atlantic world.
[11] Cudjoe has edited a number of titles, including Caribbean Women Writers, an anthology of essays collected from the first international conference on Caribbean women writers, which he organised at Wellesley College in 1988,[12][13][14] and, most recently, Narratives of Amerindians in Trinidad and Tobago; or, Becoming Trinbagonian (2016),[15][16][17] "a fascinating compendium of key documents on the narration of the Amerindian presence in Trinidad".