News & Events
On 3-4 October 2008 the After Slavery Project, in collaboration with the Wiles Trust and the School of History & Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast, hosted the Ninth Wiles Colloquium, on the theme "Rethinking Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics after the American Civil War." More than a dozen leading scholars of the post-emancipation US traveled to Belfast to take part. See full details at Wiles Colloquium
Moon-Ho Jung, Daniel Brown, Sharon Harley, Enrico Dal Lago, Erik Mathisen, Michael W. Fitzgerald, Heather and Trevor Boyd (Wiles Trust)
In marking Black History Month in the UK, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, which funds the After Slavery Project, recently featured a 'case study' on the Project on its webpage, available here. The article features an interview between Emi Spinner of the AHRC and project partners Brian Kelly and Bruce Baker.
On the 3rd of October, Thomas C. Holt, James Westfall Thompson Professor of History at the University of Chicago, presented the keynote lecture for the Wiles before a packed audience at Belfast's historic Linen Hall Library. In honor of Professor Holt's lecture, the After Slavery project teamed up with the Linen Hall's Hidden Connections Project to curate an exhibition of documents and images which will tour Ireland and the UK over the winter and spring of 2009.
On 12 February 2009, After Slavery Project Director Brian Kelly presented a public lecture to commemorate the bicentennial celebration of the birth of Abraham Lincoln at Belfast's historic Linen Hall Library. The lecture, entitled "Who Freed the Slaves? Abraham Lincoln and the New History of U. S. Slave Emancipation," was the final talk in the Linen Hall's series on Hidden Connections: Ulster and Slavery, and attempted a reassessment of Lincoln's role as the 'Great Emancipator' in light of recent scholarship.
On 24 March 2009, Brian Kelly presented a lecture entitled "'Storm Beyond Control': Freed Slaves and Political Mobilization in Reconstruction South Carolina" at the Charleston Museum in South Carolina. The lecture will be part of a temporary exhibition, From Slave to Sharecropper: African Americans in the Lowcountry after the Civil War, which is co-hosted by the Museum and the College of Charleston. Details can be found here. Dan Conover of Charleston's City Paper reviewed the exhibit and discussed the significance of the Museum's hosting of the talk here.
On 12 May 2009 After Slavery Research Assistant Daniel Brown presented his work-in-progress, entitled 'Freedpeople, the Federal Government and the Dislocations of War in North Carolina,' at the Postgraduate Seminar in the School of History & Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast
