Elsa Goveia

Elsa Vesta Goveia (12 April 1925 – 18 March 1980) was a Guyanese historian who taught at the University College of the West Indies (UCWI, called the University of the West Indies after 1962) from 1950 to 1980. Born in British Guiana (present-day Guyana), she was an exceptional student, becoming the first woman to receive the competitive British Guiana Scholarship. In 1945, she enrolled at University College London, where she became the first West Indian person to receive the Pollard Prize for English History. After graduating with an honours degree in history in 1948, she pursued a PhD at the Institute of Historical Research.

In 1950, Goveia joined UCWI faculty as an assistant lecturer. After successfully defending her thesis in 1952, she was promoted to full lecturer, and in 1956, she published A Study of the Historiography of the British West Indies. From 1956 to 1957, she served as the interim head of UCWI's history department, after which she was promoted to senior lecturer. In 1961, she contracted a debilitating illness. While she continued to participate in academic activities, including the publication of her thesis as a book titled Slave Society in the British and Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century in 1965, she eventually died of this illness in 1980. Historians such as Brian L. Moore consider her to have been an important figure in promoting the study of Caribbean history, and she is credited by historian Barry W. Higman as a key figure in developing the idea of the slave society.