Professor Jean Stubbs is an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. She is Caribbean and Latin American Liaison for the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project, which she co-founded in 2007, and is also a founder member of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative; member of the Academy of History of Cuba; past president of the regional Caribbean Studies Association and UK Society for Caribbean Studies; and Professor Emerita of London Metropolitan University, where she directed the Caribbean Studies Centre (2002-2009). Since her early monograph Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860-1958 (Cambridge University Press, 1985) / Tabaco en la periferia: El complejo agro-industrial cubano y su movimiento obrero, 1860-1959 (Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 1989) – now available in expanded new editions (Amaurea Press, 2023) – she has researched widely on Cuba, her specialist interests spanning tobacco, labour, gender, race, nation and migration. Her foundational work on tobacco, and especially the Havana cigar, led her to trace cultivation, trade, manufacture, labour and consumption on a global scale, linking commodity and migration histories spanning the late-eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, drawing on sociological, anthropological and agronomic approaches, as well as archival and oral history. A compilation of her tobacco work was published as Tobacco Counterpoints: Cuba and the Global Habano (Amaurea Press, 2024), and she co-edited Tobacco in Global Perspective, 1780-1960: Trade, Knowledge and Labour (Palgrave Macmillan, with Alexander van Wickeren and William Gervase Clarence-Smith) and The Oxford Handbook of Commodity History (OUP, with Jonathan Curry-Machado; William Gervase Clarence-Smith; and Jelmer Vos). Her interest in commodity frontiers and environmental history led her to co-produce the documentary Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes (2019, dir. Michael Chanan, co-producer Jonathan Curry-Machado), and she is currently working on two books: Cuban Mobilities in an Era of Nation Branding (co-author, Catherine Krull, University of Victoria, Canada) and a monograph provisionally titled The Havana Cigar Universe: Transnational Migration and Commodity Production.
Recently published: Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860-1959 (new expanded edition) / Tabaco en la periferia: El complejo agro-industrial cubano y su movimiento obrero 1860-1959 (nueva edición) (London: Amaurea Press, 2023)
Tobacco Counterpoints: Cuba and the Global Habano (London: Amaurea Press, 2024)
(with Alexander van Wickeren and William Clarence-Smith), Tobacco in Global Perspective, 1780-1960 (Palgrave Macmillan 2024)
