This event took place on 6 May 2026.
Read our summary of the discussion, including key themes, and listen to the recording.
Speaker biographies
Professor Louis Herns Marcelin
Louis Herns Marcelin, Ph.D., is a Haitian social sciences professor and senior researcher at the University of Miami. He serves as Chancellor at the Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development, INURED, in Haiti. He founded the Global Health and Studies program at the College of Arts and Sciences and was Associate Dean for Program Development. He has led field research in the Caribbean, the United States, and Brazil, receiving research grants and scholarly awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Spencer Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Leverhulme Trust, and many others. His work explores marginalization, health disparities, violence, kinship, family, and migration. Currently, he is a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge (June 2025–December 2026), researching the contemporary legacies of violence from slave-plantation systems in the Americas, especially Haiti.
Dr Ola Osman
Dr Ola Osman is Assistant Professor of African Politics at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity Hall, and a senior gender consultant with the United Nations World Food Programme. She serves on the Advisory Board for the Collective Healing Initiative convened by UNESCO’s Routes of Enslaved Peoples Project.
She holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from Cambridge, supported by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, and an MA in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford, funded by the Clarendon Scholarship and the Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud Scholarship. Her interdisciplinary research reframes so‑called “ethnic” conflicts in Africa by situating them within the longer history of Atlantic slavery. Her current work focuses on social inclusion, conflict, climate change, and food security in Ethiopia’s Afar Region.