Madeleine H. Burnside

Madeleine Burnside has been the Executive Director of the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society since 1991. Born in London, she holds a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she specialized in the history of art and science from the 15^th to 17^th centuries. She has spent over 20 years in the museum field, receiving a post-doctoral fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975 and an N.E.A. Fellowship in Creative Writing in 1980. Her poetry and non-fiction have been published widely, her most recent book is Spirits of the Passage, which concerns the early history of the transatlantic slave trade.