British author Betty Wood, a Cambridge academic and a historian of the study of slavery, gender and religion in the Atlantic world, died September 3. She was 76. The Guardian reported that she "was among the first to study enslaved people, and specifically enslaved women, at an elite U.K. university and was instrumental in building the profile of early American history in the U.K."
After securing a fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, in 1971, she completed her Ph.D. in 1973 and "became one of the first women appointed to the Cambridge history faculty," the Guardian noted, adding that she "built a career around a steady flow of groundbreaking publications and an abiding duty of care for her students."
Her books include Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730-1775 (1984), followed by eight other works that explored enslaved people's informal economies and their labor patterns in early America. Her best-known book is Come Shouting to Zion (1998), co-written with Sylvia Frey, a survey of the rise of black Protestantism in the American South and West Indies.
In a tribute, Girton College wrote that Wood "quietly and steadily made a number of major contributions to the understanding of her field," adding that "many expressions of sadness and respect have been appearing on social media from Early Americanists on the other side of the Atlantic over the last week: 'a great historian of slavery,' 'a guiding light in connecting historians working in the U.S. and the U.K.' and 'a smart and generous colleague.' "