Elsa Goveia

Elsa Goveia (12 April 1925 – 18 March 1980) was born in British Guiana and became a foremost scholar and historian of the Caribbean. She was the first woman to become a professor at the newly created University College of the West Indies (UCWI) and first professor of West Indian studies in the UCWI History Department. Her seminal work, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (1965), was a pioneering study of the institution of slavery and the first to put forth the concept of a "slave society" encompassing not just the slaves but the entire community. She was one of the pioneers of historical research on slavery and the Caribbean and is considered the "premier social historian" from the 1960s to her death.