Our Team

Dr. Katrina Keefer | Director REACH studio

Katrina Keefer is an Adjunct Professor at Trent University. She is a cultural historian who specializes in identity, body marking, slavery, and initiatory societies in West Africa. She is a contributor to the Liberated Africans Project and the Studies in the History of the African Diaspora – Documents (SHADD) projects, both of which engage with biography in the Atlantic world.

Keefer is working on a large scale digital humanities project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council on using permanent body marks to better discern origins and birthplace, and is embarking upon related research. She has previously published on scarification, Poro, and identity in Sierra Leone. Her research interests concern comparative slave studies, and deciphering the origins of enslaved individuals. Broadly, they can be considered West African in geographic scope, but more specifically concern matters of biography and identity.