Kristen Block

Kristen Block is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). A historian of the Atlantic World, her research has focused geographically on the Caribbean–arguably the epicenter of colonial competition in the early modern Americas. Religion and slavery were two cornerstones of early modern life and thus figure prominently in her teaching and writing about the colonial Americas, where Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans fought and collaborated with one another to shape social norms.

Her first monograph, *Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit* (University of Georgia Press, June 2012), is a comparative microhistorical study of how Christianity influenced the lives of a range of people living in Spanish and British Caribbean colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Her second book project explores how Caribbean residents defined disease, contagion, and how conflict and linguistic hybridity affected their attempts at healing. Today’s rising interest in holistic medicine from both Western scientific establishment and a range of spiritual communities brings back what was once commonly accepted by all people–that a person’s mind, body, and spirit are inextricably linked.

Dr. Block enjoys reading historical fiction, and hopes to engage a wide range of readers' historical imagination even as she analyzes topics of interest to scholars and specialists. To learn more, follow her on Academia (https://utk.academia.edu/KristenBlock) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/DrKBlock).