In 2020, Newnham fellows, staff members and students commenced a legacies of enslavement research programme.
This has included a series of public lectures co-convened by Newnham Research Fellow Dr Mezna Qato, with the Archives of the Disappeared Research Initiative at the Margaret Anstee Centre, together with a reading and discussion group.
Our inaugural Legacies of Enslavement lecture was given by Prof Theresa Singleton of Syracuse University, on ‘The Archaeology of Marronage: Mapping slave runaway sites in Hispaniola’.
Our second speaker was Jake Subryan Richards, of LSE, who spoke on ‘Violent Abolition: Encounters and Authority at the End of the Trade in Enslaved Africans to Brazil’ in February 2021.
Our third speaker was Prof Catherine Hall, Principal Investigator of the ESRC/AHRC project ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs). By holding the lectures on Zoom, we were able to open them up to researchers internationally.
Meanwhile, students were invited to apply to participate in a Student Research Project, to look further into the College’s archives, and make a preliminary assessment of the links between enslavement and Newnham. Many excellent applications were received, and two complementary projects investigating the early benefactors of the College students were selected.