Autumn Update 2024

Welcome to this September update from the Medicine and the Making of Race project. After a short summer hiatus, we're looking forward to a new academic year and a busy autumn term ahead.

This month we are co-hosting two events with the English department here at KCL. We are very excited to be welcoming Prof Katherine McKittrick of Queen's University, who will be delivering the annual Sylvia Wynter lecture. Katherine's lecture 'The Poetics of Declension: Sylvia Wynter, NourbeSe Philip, and A Smile Split by the Stars' takes place at King's College London on 25th September. The event is currently fully booked, but you can join the waiting list here. Katherine will also be joining us for a workshop the following day aimed at PGRs and ECRS.

We have two eminent visitors this term. On 10th October we are looking forward to welcoming Prof Julie Hardwick from the University of Texas at Austin who will be conducting a workshop on ‘Slavery and Domestic Violence in Early Modern Europe’. Julie’s work has been at the forefront of scholarship on gender and relationships in early modern France. At KCL, she will be pre-circulating work in progress, and thinking with us through domesticity, slavery, and the archives of religion in early modern Europe.  Attendance for this is limited – but for those unable to attend, the following day she will be speaking at the IHR.

We are also thrilled to welcome back Prof Jennifer Morgan, who first visited our project in 2022 to speak about her field-defining book: Reckoning with Slavery.  In November she will be visiting to share new work in progress. Spaces for this will be limited, so keep an eye on our website for further details.

Research is at the heart of our project and we are currently pursuing two quite different strands of archival work. Over the summer, Hannah was fortunate to be able to spend some time in the beautiful Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, to consult records on plantation medicine in eighteenth-century Jamaica. In October Hannah and Carolin head to the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, continuing work on the role of medical practitioners in the financial and bureaucratic apparatus of slave trade. Any tips or recommendations are welcome!

If you are interested in the results of this research, some of the fruits of these and other trips will be presented in the UK and the USA. On 24 October Carolin will be presenting new work on Black Healing and Belonging in the Canary Islands at the Cambridge Early Modern World History Workshop. And over the coming term, Hannah is presenting in Sheffield (19 November), Cambridge (28 November), and The Huntingdon Library (6 December).

As always, check out our website and X” feed for updates and information. We are always keen to hear from interested researchers and from anyone visiting London.

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Spring Update 2024