Please join the Department of American and Canadian Studies for its distinguished annual lecture delivered this year by Professor Manisha Sinha, Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut, and a world-leading expert on the history of slavery and abolition. This lecture is presented in association with the Centre for Research in Race and Rights.

Professor Manisha Sinha’s’ talk will offer a new history of Anglo-American abolition, arguing that abolitionism was a radical social movement. She will uncover the political significance of slave resistance in the growing radicalisation of the abolition movement.

The talk will reject conventional historical divisions between slave resistance and antislavery activism, and challenge much of the received historical wisdom of abolitionists as bourgeois reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Expanding the chronology of abolition, she will also situate it transnationally and explore the impact of the Haitian Revolution, the European Revolutions of the 1830s and 1848, British Chartism, Irish Repeal, and the international peace movement on the politics and ideology of abolition. More broadly, this talk will interrogate how radical social movements like abolition provide political and ideological space for the disfranchised and become engines of political change.

Free, all welcome, but please register online.

Part of Black History Month 2016. You can keep up to date on events news, comment and profiles on our People and Culture blog, which we will update throughout October. You can also take a look at our gallery of events.