Research Description: I’m currently writing about the impact of formerly enslaved African Americans on British society in the mid c19th, how in turn British society responded to these individuals and how they fought racial stereotypes. Individuals include Frederick Douglass, Henry ‘Box’ Brown, William and Ellen Craft, James Watkins and William Wells Brown, among others. I will bring my project to the present day by assessing how American slavery has been remembered and how this has led to nostalgia on American plantations and an active protest memory that can be seen through the Black Lives Matter movement.
Research Keywords: Slavery and abolition; African Americans in Britain; the Black British community in the c19th; celebrity culture; performance; slavery iconography; memory; protest.
Countries and Regions of Interest: Britain (formerly enslaved African Americans visited all regions of Britain, even the Isle of Wight!); Northern and Southern states of the USA.
Research Description: My research over the years has encompassed the entire span of Black British history up until the 20th century.Recently my focus has been on European attitudes to the people of Africa and Asia during the Middle Ages.
Research Keywords: Black experience; Medieval Travellers.
Countries and Regions of Interest: Great Britain; Africa; Asia.
Publications:
Black People in Britain 1650-1850 (Macmillan Education, 1984)
‘Medieval Travellers: Perceptions and Prejudices’ in BASA Newsletter (July 2012).
Research Description: I work primarily on black British writing, c.1770-1830. Black people writing during this period are often understood to have been primarily or exclusively interested in questions surrounding slavery and ethnicity. I think this tends to homogenise readings of a hugely diverse body of work. In reality, authors like Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Boston King, John Jea, Robert Wedderburn and Mary Prince were involved in, and wrote about, almost every aspect of British social, political and cultural life. Through investigating the social, professional and confessional networks in which these authors were key actors, we can recognise the diversity and scope of early black British writing. I am currently writing a monograph on this subject.
Research Keywords: Black history; writing; literature; poetry; autobiography; biography; life writing; radicalism; religion; methodism; calvinism; britain; british; eighteenth century; nineteenth century.
Countries and Regions of Interest: Britain; Caribbean; North America.
Publications:
As Editor:
Katie Donington, Ryan Hanley and Jessica Moody (eds.), Little Britain’s Memory of Slavery: Local Nuances of a ‘National Sin’ (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press 2016) [Forthcoming].
As Author:
‘“There to sing the song of Moses”: John Jea in Liverpool and Portsmouth’, in Katie Donington, Ryan Hanley and Jessica Moody (eds.), Britain’s Memory of Slavery: Local Nuances of a ‘National Sin’ (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016) [Forthcoming, 2016].
‘Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’, Slavery & Abolition, 36:2 (2015).
‘The Royal Slave: Nobility, Diplomacy and the “African Prince” in Britain, 1748-1752’, Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction [Forthcoming, 2015].
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