Prof. Ruma Chopra

Ruma Chopra is professor of history at the San Jose State University, Califronia. She grew up in India and attended high school in the U.S. After giving up on a degree in Chemical Engineering, she studied English, Linguistics, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies before she completed her PhD in History. Her work examines how uprooted people “fit” in a foreign locale. My first two books (Unnatural Rebellion & Choosing Sides) contextualize the experience of American loyalists in the U.S., Canada, and Caribbean during the era of the American Revolution. Her forthcoming work, Almost Home (Yale University Press), honors the resilience of the deported Trelawney Town Maroons in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone during the age of British humanitarianism. (See related blog: https://earlycanadianhistory.ca/2017/04/17/refugees-fit-for-rescue-loyalists-maroons-and-mikmaq/ ). She am currently preoccupied with two questions: (1) the relationship between ex-slaves and indentured servants in the post-slavery Caribbean; and (2) the role of climate in the making of empire.