Dr. Theodora "Tedi" Light is a historian of the early modern Americas whose work explores Native American history, the U.S. South, and public history through questions of refuge, resistance, and community formation. She earned her B.A. in History and Spanish from the University of South Carolina Beaufort in 2020 and her M.A. in History from the University of Georgia in 2022. Her master's thesis, "Forging Refuge between Shatter Zones: The Tocobaga Maroons of the Wacissa," established a scholarly trajectory centered on Indigenous experience in the colonial Southeast and circum-Caribbean. She remained at the University of Georgia for her Ph.D., culminating in her successful 2025 dissertation, "On the Road to Rebel: Indigenous Maroons in Cuba and Florida, 1500-1739," which further developed that research agenda across a broader Atlantic world.
An important early milestone in Dr. Light's career came when she became the first student from USCB to receive a Fulbright Student Award. That opportunity supported seven months of study and research in Spain, where she investigated the enslavement of Indigenous people along the coast of La Florida in the sixteenth century. Her work there included research at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and drew on her strong Spanish-language training as well as her proficiency in early modern Spanish paleography. The experience helped shape the direction of her later graduate work and reflects a central theme of her scholarship: recovering the histories of peoples too often left at the margins of traditional narratives. Dr. Light has described her goal as connecting histories by illuminating underrepresented communities and making serious research accessible to broad audiences.
Dr. Light's scholarship is marked by an interdisciplinary reach that connects archival history, legal history, public history, and archaeology. Her published work includes "Frankenstein's Monster: Constructing a Legal Regime to Regulate Race and Place," which examines the making of race and law, and "US Asylum Policy: Human Rights Policy Damned by Politics," an earlier piece reflecting her longstanding interest in migration, displacement, and state power. She has presented research on topics including Indian slavery and maronnage in early modern Florida, the Tocobaga and Calusa of South Florida, and U.S. immigration and asylum policy. Her work has been supported by a range of competitive grants and fellowships, including Fulbright support for research in Spain, a research grant from the Alliance for Weedon Island Archaeological Research and Education, and multiple travel grants from the University of Georgia. Taken together, these projects reveal a scholar consistently engaged with histories of movement, survival, and the creative strategies communities have used to resist domination.
Alongside her research, Dr. Light has built a substantial record of teaching, service, and public engagement. At the University of Georgia, she served as a graduate teaching assistant for survey courses in American history both before and after 1865. Her public humanities work includes digitizing and indexing oral histories, writing interpretive materials, helping launch community history collections, and serving as a lead docent responsible for volunteer coordination, exhibit support, lecture planning, and public programming. She has also participated in archaeological and preservation work at several Lowcountry sites, experiences that complement her archival scholarship with material and place-based understandings of the past. Throughout her academic career, Dr. Light has been recognized for excellence in history and Spanish, for leadership in graduate student and civic organizations, and for her ability to connect rigorous scholarship with public audiences. Fluent in English and highly accomplished in Spanish, she brings unusual linguistic range, archival skill, and public-facing commitment to the study of the Atlantic world and its histories of refuge, resistance, and memory. She currently serves as an adjunct professor of history here at her undergraduate alma mater, the University of South Carolina Beaufort.