The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery has announced the inaugural Elsa Goveia public lecture at University College London (UCL)—“The Measure of their Sadness: Slavery and Private Life in the Early Black Atlantic”—which will be will be delivered by Jennifer L. Morgan (New York University). The is event takes place on May 18, 2022, from 6:00 to 8:00pm (GMT) at the Darwin Lecture Theatre (UCL). The lecture is free, but you will need to register. See details here.

Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and is the author of the prize-winning Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021), Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and numerous other publications. Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in the Black Atlantic.
Professor Morgan is the inaugural Elsa Goveia Speaker at the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, UCL.

Elsa V. Goveia (1925-1980) read History at UCL from 1945-1948 where she was one of the first West Indian students to have studied in the department. In 1947 she won the Pollard Prize for English history in 1947, becoming the first West Indian to do so. After completing her PhD at the University of London in 1952 she was to become the first woman appointed as a professor at the newly created University College of the West Indies (UCWI) and the first Caribbean-born professor of West Indian studies in the UCWI History Department. For three decades she taught History there and was responsible for a pioneering course on Caribbean History while undertaking foundational work in the understanding of ‘slave societies.’ Among her publications were A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies to the end of the nineteenth century (1956) and Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (1965).

The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery has been established at UCL with the generous support of the Hutchins Center at Harvard. The Centre builds on two earlier projects based at UCL tracing the impact of slave-ownership on the formation of modern Britain: the ESRC-funded Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (2009-2012), and the ESRC and AHRC-funded Structure and significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership 1763-1833 (2013-2015).

For more information, see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/goveialecture/