about me
I finally retired in 2004 after nearly 50 years of teaching, 1956-91 at high school, mostly at Wolmer's Girls' School, and 1980-2004 at university level, in the History Department, on the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, at first on a part time basis, and then from 1991 to 2004, full time. During all that time, and still today, I have been researching Jamaican history, especially in the period between the Morant Bay 'Rebellion' and the 1938 riots. My doctoral thesis, which I worked on from 1975 to 1988, was on the life and political career of Dr J Robert Love, the Black Bahamian who played a significant role in politics and journalism in Jamaica between 1890 and 1914. My work on Robert Love introduced me to a highly significant but under-researched period of Jamaican history, when 2-3 generations of tough, courageous and self-confident Jamaicans laid the foundations of the modern nation. The almost total neglect of the achievements of those generations has left a telling gap in Jamaicans' perceptions of their past. I hope that with my web sites I may be able to do just a little to start to fill that gap, and restore the lives of the people of those generations to the Jamaican consciousness. Joy Lumsden, MA (Cantab) PhD (UWI) |