History and Philosophy

I am a social and cultural historian focusing on British Caribbean slavery and its legacies. My primary research interests lie in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century British Atlantic world, the transatlantic slave trade, resistance and empire. I have published widely on resistance by the enslaved, the British abolition campaigns, emancipation and their racialised afterlives, including slavery's financial legacies, the politics and ethics of contemporary cultural memory and questions of reparative justice. Critically engaging historical constructions of `race¿ and representations of `the past' in relation to the politics of the present is central to my academic research, to my teaching and to my social engagement practice. My internationally recognised research has been funded by the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust.

I am currently completing a book project about the ways in which colonial labour relations were reconfigured in Caribbean slave societies after the 1807 abolition of the British slave trade. By focusing on archival traces of the lives of so-called indentured 'Re-captive Africans', the study analyses how the ending of enslavement can be understood 'from below' and in relation to the global and imperial continuum of coerced labour forms.

I am engaged in a collaborative multi-scaler research project (with Cathy Bergin) exploring the idea of 'reparative history'. The project focuses on how claims on the past are shaped by the contemporary politics of 'race', and the particular ways in which those claims tend to occlude the centrality of the black radical tradition. The project explores how we might conceptualise and trace the historical legacies of transatlantic enslavement both within the history of capitalism and as challenges to dominant liberal paradigms of `freedom'. The project critically engages the politics and practices of history-making as well as occluded, erased and hidden transnational/diasporic histories. Outputs for the project thus far include two conferences, an edited special journal issue (Race & Class, 57, 3 (2016)), and an ongoing local history project, Tracing Brighton's Connections to Transatlantic Enslavement. I am also interested in contemporary representations of enslavement and its legacies in Black Atlantic literary and cultural contexts, in the history and politics of postcolonial and cultural theory and in related critical engagement and practice including the project of decolonising the curriculum.

I completed a BA (Hons.) degree in English Literature and an MA in Culture and Social Change at the University of Southampton before studying for a D.Phil. at the University of Sussex. MY AHRB funded doctoral thesis focused on the British anti-slavery campaigns, the Enlightenment culture of sentiment and the slave narrative.

Prior to the University of Galway, I held academic posts at the University of Brighton, University of Sussex and the University of Winchester. I was a Visiting Fellow at the Gilder Lehman Centre for the Study of Slavery, Abolition and Resistance, Yale University, in Spring 2018 and awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship during 2019-2020 for my research project, `Indenturing Re-Captured Africans in the Caribbean, 1807-1828'.