Exploring Legacies of Enslavement: a research series

This blog series showcases ongoing research on the legacies of enslavement, past and present. It features work by Early Career Researchers across disciplines, highlighting emerging scholarship, new methodologies and research in progress.

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.

Quantifying freedom (5 March 2026)
Dr Lamin Manneh, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow (Faculty of History)
A study of how, in the early 19th century, 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.

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 and highlighting how spatial divides shape experiences of belonging and exclusion.

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

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, and how they carry layered, overlapping temporalities across different contexts.

Antislavery and the country house (30 April 2026)
Molly Groarke PhD candidate in Modern British History. 
This blog explores Killerton House, a National Trust country house, through its connections to the antislavery movement and the British Empire, highlighting its importance as a heritage institution grappling with complex and contested imperial legacies.