Speakers
Marcus Wood

Marcus Wood is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His research interest are: satire in the romantic period, the representation of slavery, colonial and post-colonial literature and theory, and semiotics. He is the author of Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (OUP, 2002), Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (MUP, 2000), Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790-1822 (Clarendon Press, 1994) and the editor of The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology, 1764-1866 (OUP, 2003). He is also a creative writer and installation artist whose work explores issues of race and the inheritance of slavery, and questions assumptions surrounding the concept of blackness.

Brycchan Carey

Brycchan Carey is a Reader in English Literature at Kingston University. He has research interests in the eighteenth century, working primarily on the literature and culture of slavery and abolition, on London literature, and on the relationship between literature and science. He is the author of British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); he has also co-edited of Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the British Abolition Act of 1807 (Essays and Studies in Romanticism Series, 2007) and Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760-1838 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Nigel Leask

Nigel Leask is Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Glasgow. He research interests are: Romantic literature and culture, Romantic engagements with Empire, Travel writing, Anglo-Indian literature of the Romantic period and Burns and Scottish literature of the 1790s. He is the author of The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought, (London: Macmillan, 1988), British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. (Cambridge University Press 1992), Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (Oxford University Press, 2002). He has also edited S.T.Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. (London: J.M.Dent, Everyman Edition 1997), Romantic Period Travel Narratives of Spanish America and the Caribbean (Edition); Volume 4 of Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion 1770-1835 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002) and co-edited (with David Simpson and Peter De Bolla) Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste. (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Alan Rice

Alan Rice is a Reader in American Studies and Cultural Theory at the University of Central Lancashire. He has research interests in African American literature and culture and the black Atlantic. He is the author of Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (Continuum Press, 2003), and the co-editor of (with Martin Crawford) Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglas and Transatlantic Reform (University of Georgia Press, 1999). More recently he has developed interests in the memorialisation of the black Atlantic and was a founder member of the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project in Lancaster (STAMP). He is the academic consultant to a project to commission an artist to make a memorial to victims of the trade on the quayside at Lancaster and to establish artists workshops to develop projects with Lancaster schools. His next monograph will be on African Atlantic Visual Artists and their refiguring of history especially in relation to slavery and the middle passage.

Eric Graham

Eric Graham is an independent researcher and Honorary Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Scottish History, University of Edinburgh. His research interests cover a spectrum of subjects related to the Scots and the sea – from their involvement in selling children as indentured servants to the West Indies, to blockade running with Clyde paddle steamers for the Confederates. Research Projects include: Historical Associate for Lloyd's Register of Shipping, Historical Adviser to the Edinburgh Castle Vaults Exhibition, the Du Bois Institute (Harvard) Transatlantic Slavery Database and research for Scottish Executive on the Bi-centennial anniversary of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. He is the author of Clyde Built: Blockade Runners, Cruisers & Armoured Rams of the American Civil War (Birlinn Press, 2006), Seawolves: Pirates & the Scots (Birlinn Press, 2005) and A Maritime History of Scotland 1650–1790 (Tuckwell Press, 2002). He has been widely published in learned journals, is a regular reviewer for the International Journal of Maritime History and a founding member of the Early Scottish Maritime History Exchange (ESME).

Siobhan Convery

Siobhan Convery is the Senior Curator, Historic Collections, University of Aberdeen. She is also the Press & Publicity Officer for the Scottish Council on Archives.

James Procter

James Procter is Senior Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Newcastle. His research interests are in English Literature after Empire, 1978-1990; black British writing and cinema; the Caribbean short story, 1920-1960; the writings of Stuart Hall; the relationship between postcolonialism and everyday life; the implications of ‘reception’ (as both hospitality and hermeneutics) for diasporic texts and theory. He is the author of Dwelling places : Postwar black British writing (Manchester University Press, 2003), Stuart Hall (Routledge, 2004) and the editor of Writing Black Britain (MUP, 2000). He is presently the principal investigator on the AHRC funded `Devolving Diasporas', a three-year project (2007-2009) investigating the relationship between reading, location, and migration.

Gemma Robinson

Gemma Robinson is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Stirling. She has research interests in Caribbean writing (especially poetry), Guyanese culture and politics, postcolonial literatures and cultures, Black British writing, slavery in the Americas, publishing in the Caribbean and textual criticism. She is the editor of University of Hunger, Collected Poems and Selected Prose of Martin Carter (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2006); and Over Seas: A Transnational Caribbean, The Arts Journal Special Issue, 2.2 (March 2006). She has contributed to the Guyanese newspaper, Stabroek News, and have written articles on Guyanese writers on the radio, Martin Carter, Wilson Harris, teaching ‘the Americas’, Caribbean manuscripts, Caribbean protest writing. She also a project leader on the AHRC funded `Devolving Diasporas', a three-year project (2007-2009) investigating the relationship between reading, location, and migration.

Abgail Ward

Abgail Ward is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is interested in how slavery has been represented visually from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, in particular, the work of contemporary photographers and artists such as Ingrid Pollard, Yinka Shonibare and Godfried Donkor. She has published essays in Moving Worlds, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Journal of Postcolonial LIterature, and is currently writing a monograph on representations of slavery in selected works of Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar.