My name is Matthew Ownby, and I am a graduate student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, studying cultural and historical geography. My research interests include, but are not limited to, the cultural geography of Latin America and the Caribbean, marronage and maroon communities, the geographies of resistance, and space, place, and power in the colonial era. My future work will contribute to the scholarship on Afro-Indigenous relations in and around the archipelago of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. I have taken a particular interest in the relationship between the Indigenous Kalinago people and the previously enslaved maroons on the island of Dominica, and how they collectively utilized their geographies to defend and resist colonial occupation.

I am advised by urban and cultural geographer Solange Muñoz. I currently serve as a graduate teaching assistant for Tracey Norrell, responsible for course grading and serving as the direct point of contact for undergraduate students in World Geography and European War and Society. While I have not yet published journal articles, I look forward to future opportunities in academic writing and research.