Devin Leigh

Devin Leigh is a historian of the Atlantic World who studies connections between the Caribbean, West Africa, and Great Britain in the eighteenth century. His research has appeared in a number of academic journals, including Atlantic Studies, the Journal of Caribbean History, and History in Africa. In addition to teaching at USF, he teaches Global Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Caribbean
• Africa
• Europe
• Slavery studies
• Global studies
• World history

• Eighteenth century
• Biography
• Colonialism
• Slavery
• Ethnography

• UC Davis, PhD in History, 2021
• Loyola University, MA in History, 2015
• DePaul University, BA in History, 2012

• Adjunct Professor in Global Studies, UC Berkeley
• Adjunct Professor in History, College of Marin
• Adjunct Professor in History, San Francisco State University
• Adjunct Professor in History, UC Davis
• Adjunct Professor in History, Solano Community College

• Research Fellow, Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2021
• Research Fellow, Eccles Center for American Studies at the British Library, 2019    
• Research Fellow, Hemispheric Institute on the Americas at UC Davis, 2018

• With Michael Becker, "Answering Equiano: An Enslaver's Sketch of Igboland in an Age of Abolition," The William and Mary Quarterly (forthcoming, October 2025)

• "An Audacious Review: Unpacking Elsa Goveia's Critique of Eric Williams," The CLR James Journal 30, Nos. 1/2 (2024): 191-220

• “In the Footsteps of Bosman: Archibald Dalzel’s Letter from Anomabo, West Africa, and the Cumulative Tradition of Eighteenth-Century Imperial Ethnography,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 56, 4 (2023): 549-565.

• “The Empirical and the Speculative,” Roundtable Contribution to Forum on the 50th Anniversary of Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and Slaves, Eighteenth-Century Studies 56, No. 1 (2022): 13-19.
• With Clifton E. Sorrell III, “How to Control the History of a Slave Rebellion: A Case Study from the Sources of Blackwall’s Revolt in St. Mary’s Parish, Jamaica, 1765,” The Journal of Caribbean History Vol. 55, No. 1 (2021): 19-56.