Exploring Legacies of Enslavement

Research series

Exploring Legacies of Enslavement is a research series featuring articles by Early Career Researchers exploring the histories, legacies and afterlives of enslavement. The series showcases new scholarship, fresh perspectives and research in progress from across disciplines.

Latest articles

Early twentieth-century African American family standing outside a wooden home in Blackdom, New Mexico, one of the best-known Black towns founded after emancipation.

Landed Blackness: Post-emancipation maroonage and Black autonomy (11 June 2026)
Darold Cuba, PhD candidate in History
Explores how Black communities after emancipation used land, family networks, and institutions to build self‑governing settlements, resist racism, and shape their own political futures

Dr. Tara Inniss speaking at a lectern during a presentation, with a slide on Barbadian rum-making displayed on a screen beside her.

Repair in practice: reflections on a sabbatical rooted in Caribbean reparatory work (21 May 2026)
Dr Tara Inniss, Visiting Scholar at Jesus College
This piece explores reparatory work in the Caribbean and what ‘repair’ means in practice when addressing the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

A wide view of a peach‑coloured historic building with arched windows and ivy‑covered walls, set behind a green lawn and low stone wall, with trees and a blue, partly cloudy sky in the background.

Antislavery and the country house (30 April 2026)
Molly Groarke, PhD candidate in Modern British History. 
This blog examines Killerton House’s links to antislavery and empire, highlighting its role as a heritage site engaging with complex and contested imperial legacies.

A detailed black-and-white illustration of a spiralled seashell, shown against a plain light background.

In time of shells (16 April 2026)
Celeste Kazani, PhD candidate in English.
A reflective, creative exploration of “shells” as objects of time and memory, considering how their material and sonic histories connect oceanic movement, colonial exchange and enslavement.

Historic photograph of Newnham College buildings across open grounds.

Difficulties and dangers: researching legacies of enslavement in a post-abolition women’s college 
(30 March 2026)
Toyin Akinkunmi and Tiger Chan. 
This piece reflects the research experiences of the authors, who contributed to Newnham College’s investigation into its legacies of enslavement.

A person working in a kitchen stands beside a stove, stirring a large pot with a long wooden utensil. The setting includes metal cookware, a tiled wall, and various kitchen equipment in the background.

Black Town & Gown: The historical legacy of Black presence in Cambridge (19 March 2026)
Seetha Tan, PhD candidate in Sociology
A reflection on the making of the Black Town & Gown documentary, exploring Black histories in Cambridge through community voices, archival work and film.

A vertically oriented, vintage-style map of West Africa showing the coastal regions from Senegal down to Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Quantifying freedom (5 March 2026)
Dr Lamin Manneh, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow 
A study of how Liberated Africans were resettled in English‑style missionary‑run villages and how the quantification of their daily lives shaped British ideas of race, data practices and colonial governance.

cocoa tree

A woman artist and plantation slavery in the Royal Collection (12 February 2026)
Eleanor Stephenson, PhD candidate in History
A study of Vere Lynch, an early woman painter in British colonial Jamaica, and how visual culture supported plantation slavery while erasing enslaved labour.

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