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The Past in the Present: the legacies of colonial slavery

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

No booking required

Professor Catherine Hall (History, UCL) presents the MA Culture, Diaspora, Ethnicity and Race Forum at Birkbeck Public Lecture: 'The Past in the Present: the legacies of colonial slavery.'

Professor Catherine Hall is Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History and Chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership at UCL. Since the 1990s, her work has focused on the relation between Britain and its empire: Civilising Subjects (2002) explored the entangled yet forgotten connections between Birmingham and Jamaica in the mid-19th century; Macaulay and Son (2012) focused on the relationship between Zachary Macaulay, a leading abolitionist, and his son Thomas Babington Macaulay whose History of England erased the Caribbean and slavery.

Since 2009, she has acted as the Principal Investigator on 2 phases of the ESRC/AHRC project 'Legacies of British Slave-ownership' seeking to put slavery back into British history and the collaborative volume Legacies of British Slave-ownership was published in 2014. Her current research centres on Edward Long and his family, leading slave-owners in Jamaica in the 17th and 18th centuries and powerful figures in the defence of the slave trade and slavery.

This event is a free, public lecture that is open to all but places are limited. Please register your attendance on Eventbrite so that we know you will be joining us.

The Race Forum at Birkbeck is a public space for discussions about 'race' and racism, class, multiculture and postcoloniality. It hosts seminars and symposia which explore histories and legacies of empire and consider how local debates on 'race' and racism are shaped by the global geopolitics of the twenty-first century.

The MA Culture, Diaspora, Ethnicity is a multidisciplinary Master's programme that explores debates on 'race' and racism, multiculture and postcoloniality.

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