Principal's Biography
Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal: Professor V Eudine Barriteau, GCM
Violet Eudine Barriteau is a Professor of Gender and Public Policy and is a Grenadian born, Caribbean feminist and activist with a distinguished record as a Caribbean scholar and administrator. Professor Barriteau has served in various roles at The University of the West Indies for more than 30 years and has considerable experience in senior University administration.
Professor Barriteau is the author of The Political Economy of Gender in the Twentieth Century Caribbean published by Palgrave International, and won the University of the West Indies Press’ inaugural best-selling text book prize for the edited work Confronting Power, Theorizing Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the Caribbean. Her latest publication is the edited collection, Love and Power: Caribbean Discourses on Gender which was published by UWI Press in 2012. She has co-edited four other publications as well as published over thirty book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Professor Barriteau served as the first Head of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit, a position which she held for fifteen years. She was also the first woman at The University of the West Indies to be appointed Campus Coordinator, School for Graduate Studies and Research. This is a position she held for four years until becoming the second woman to be appointed Deputy Principal at the Cave Hill Campus on August 01, 2008. During her six year tenure as Deputy Principal of the Campus, two of her major accomplishments were serving as Chair of the Campus’ Institutional Accreditation Exercise, which resulted in full accreditation of the Campus for six years, and serving as Chair of the 2011 UWI Games Organising Committee. On August 01, 2014 The UWI Open Campus welcomed Professor Barriteau as its second Principal, a position she held for nine months before assuming the Principalship of the Cave Hill Campus on May 01, 2015.
Professor Barriteau has received a number of national, regional and international awards and recognitions. On February 07, 2016, as Grenada celebrated its 42nd Anniversary of Independence, The Government of Grenada presented The Order of Grenada Gold Award for Excellence to her, in recognition of her contribution to education. In celebration of Barbados’ 47th Anniversary of Independence in 2013, the Barbados Government awarded her the Gold Crown of Merit, the country’s third highest honour in recognition of her invaluable contribution to gender and development. In July 2011, she was bestowed the 10th CARICOM Triennial Award for Women at the Opening Ceremony of the 32nd Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM in St. Kitts. Professor Barriteau served as the President of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) from 2009 to 2010. Professor Barriteau was appointed Chair of the CARICOM Review Panel on the Governance of Cricket in May 2015. In July 2017, Professor Barriteau was appointed as a Board Member on the University of Miami Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas - External Advisory Committee.
She was an inaugural International Research Fellow at the Centre for Excellence in Gender Research, GEXCEL, Örebro, Sweden in April 2008, and returned in November 2010 and March 2013 by special invitation. In 1997 she had the honour of being the Inaugural Fellow of the Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Women in Development Visitor Programme at the University of Toronto. She was awarded a Howard University Doctoral Fellowship in 1992 and was a LASPAU/Fellowship scholar at New York University 1982 - 1984. In 1992, she became a Scholar of the American Association of University Women and prior to that, the first Caribbean scholar to be awarded the Margaret McNamara Memorial Fund Scholarship in 1991.
Professor Barriteau’s research interests encompass feminist theorizing, gender and public policy, gender issues in higher education, investigations of the Caribbean political economy, theorizing heterosexual women’s socio-sexual unions, educational leadership and change.