02 — The Work
A DPhil in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, beginning October 2026.
The research
Building on over 15 years of researching environmental science and stewardship with Black and Indigenous communities globally, Cynthia's work explores the intersection of natural science, heritage, and reparative justice in the Caribbean and South America.
Her research takes the red howler monkey as a focal species to ask how forests, communities, and wildlife make one another in the rivers and rainforests of Guyana — a country whose Guiana Shield holds one of the most intact tropical carbon sinks on Earth. The work braids ecological survey, bioacoustics, ethnography, and archival research, foregrounding the imperative of Black and Indigenous science for coexistence with a rapidly changing planet.
A central component is untying the epistemological violence of colonial science. Given where Guyana is situated geopolitically and ecologically, this work is central to Pan-African and global liberatory movements for new planetary futures.
The Place
Rainforests, rivers, and ancestral plantation geographies along the Essequibo and Berbice — ecologies that are at once a planetary carbon stronghold and the landscape into which her ancestors were forcibly brought.
The Method
Bioacoustic monitoring of howler troops, ethnographic work alongside Indigenous and Afro-Guyanese communities, ecological surveys, and archival research at the Bodleian and Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
The Vision
Cynthia is building toward a research institute for studying wildlife through Black and Indigenous sciences — a place where evolutionary theory is rewritten from the ground that grew it.
Why Oxford, why now
Why Oxford
Central to the history of ecological and evolutionary science — and home to critical Caribbean collections found nowhere else, including maps of the very plantations where her ancestors were enslaved. Oxford is also the ground on which reparative and epistemic justice in the sciences must be done.
Why the School of Geography and Environment
Ranked #1 in the world for 16 consecutive years (QS World University Rankings by Subject). Cutting-edge faculty and the institutional capacity for multi- and transdisciplinary research at the scale this work requires.
Why now
Guyana's capital, Georgetown, is projected to be underwater by 2030. The forests Cynthia studies serve as planetary lungs in mediating global carbon levels. This research is of critical and urgent planetary and regional importance.
Field & archive
