The UBC Department of History Colloquium Series brings together scholars who are exploring important methodological, chronological, or geographical issues that challenge the frontiers of our discipline and contribute strongly to our collective discussions.
We are pleased to invite you to the first event of the 2022/2023 Colloquium series, featuring a talk by Dr. Natalie Zacek, Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.
Whether you choose to attend virtually or in-person, please register for the event. A light lunch will be available for in-person attendees who register in advance.
The image is of Christopher Codrington, an extremely wealthy West Indian plantation owner who used much of his fortune to endow the library at his alma mater, All Souls Oxford. In the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, the college deleted his name from the library, but the statue remains. Photo by Natalie Zacek.
Talk Abstract
Although traces of enslaved labour are not present at English universities as they are at so many in the United States, the former set of institutions are also engaged in debates over their relationship with slavery in the British empire, specifically in Jamaica, Barbados, and other Caribbean islands. In this talk, Dr. Zacek, who has investigated her home institution’s connections to enslavement, will discuss the similarities and differences in how these controversies are playing out on both sides of the Atlantic, and how they connect with broader disputes about historical representation, colonial legacies, and reparative justice.
Speaker Biography
Natalie Zacek is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester (UK). She is a historian of the Atlantic world, with emphasis on the British colonies in the Caribbean. In spring 2022 she was a fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, at which she began the research on which this talk is based. She is currently working on two book projects, a study of the historical and contemporary links between English universities and colonial slavery and an examination of the effect of British Caribbean absentees and their capital on later Georgian London.
