Biography:
Professor Aymer has expertise in working with and teaching people of diverse backgrounds and ages. Immediately upon graduation and armed with a post-graduate Diploma in Education acquired at the University of the West Indies, Professor Aymer spent the next few years teaching throughout the Caribbean. Whether at kindergarten, grade school, or high school levels or organizing adult literacy classes, wherever need and opportunity coalesced on the several islands on which she lived, she used it to teach and observe. As a result, she has a unique understanding of how formal educational systems work, or do not, in the lives of students in classrooms and in the wider society.

Professor Aymer joined the Department of Sociology at Tufts in 1990, after having taught at Northeastern and Brandeis University respectively. An immigrant to the United States herself, her travels throughout the Caribbean helped hone her Ph.D. dissertation topic that focused on the labor migration treks of Caribbean women. A post-graduate fellowship at the Bunting Institute, Harvard University, allowed her to complete her book Uprooted Women: Migrant Domestics in the Caribbean (Praeger Press, 1997).

Professor Aymer continues to do research and write on immigration issues. Her scholarly interests in political and economic sociological issues are now concentrated in two areas. She has been presenting papers at conferences and submitting papers to journals on a new political and economic arrangement in the Caribbean: the Caribbean Community Single Market and Economy (CSME), an arrangement enacted by thirteen Caribbean countries and modeled on the European Union (EU). Her interests examine how the CSME will affect regional and international labor migration. Additionally, Professor Aymer has been working on a book, based on her research on U.S-based Pentecostal evangelicalism that has swept through developing countries and dramatically replaced the influence of British-based colonial religions in the Anglophone Caribbean. The book examines how globalization facilities enhance intra-regional migration, and enable large U.S.-based missionary outfits to support indigenous pastors and new church plantings throughout the Anglophone Caribbean.