From 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin' to “Countering Colston”: slavery and memory in a transatlantic undergraduate research project

In 2016–17 and in 2018–19, undergraduate students and faculty at Huron University College in London, Canada, and at Bath Spa University in the UK collaborated on an innovative community-based research project: Phantoms of the Past: Slavery and Resistance, History and Memory in the Atlantic World. Our paper outlines the structure of the project, highlights student research, and argues that the Phantoms undergraduate student researchers helped to create an innovative and important body of work on transatlantic Public History and local commemorative practice

Afro-European experiences: from the third century to the third millennium

This public lecture looks into Afro-European identities by studying their histories, from Saint Maurice, an Egyptian who became the leader of a legendary Roman legion in the 3rd century, to 21st century migrants. Its aim is to understand how the notion of ‘exceptionalism’ has contributed to remembering and then forgetting the long history of African/European human encounters. Mainly used in the fields of cultural studies, sociology and arts, the term ‘African diaspora’ has more recently been replaced by ‘Afro-European’ or ‘Afropean’. African or Afro-descent destinies and creativity have led to newly-coined terms such as ‘Afrocentrism’, ‘Afropessimism’ and ‘Afrophobia’, to name but a few. These are laudable attempts to grasp intricate notions in a small number of words. However, as they refer to contemporary post-war encounters between people of African and European descents, they play into the notion of newly born identities. As this lecture will show, there is a much longer history of Afro-European experiences which are both fascinating in their own right and can contribute to present-day understanding