DPIR’s Morgan DaCosta awarded prestigious UC Santa Barbara fellowship
DPIR DPhil International Relations student Morgan Dacosta has won a top Dissertation Fellowship in Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara for the 2024-25 academic year.
The year-long fellowship is targeted at students working in interdisciplinary social science, humanities and STEM disciplines, whose research focus is specifically situated within Black Studies and who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of the academic community.
Morgan will be in residence at the university for the entirety of her fellowship, during which time she is expected to complete her dissertation, teach one undergraduate course and present one public lecture.
I am humbled and very grateful to have the opportunity to work under the invaluable guidance of the historic Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.”
Morgan’s dissertation, ‘Police Power, Plantation Principles: Reiterating Slave Society Order in Jamaica and Trinidad 1838-1990’ draws on a wide range of archival materials centering the perspectives of Afro-Caribbean people to develop a genealogy of post-slavery police power.
She conceptualises police power as a force developed to reproduce within post-colonial states the racial and economic hierarchies, and corresponding disciplined subjectivities, which characterised the slave society and international imperial order.
Her research interests include the global implications of slavery’s afterlife, postcolonial theories of international relations, Africana radical thought and anti-imperial mobilisations, Caribbean cultural critique.
