The University of Glasgow has joined with Emory, Harvard, Rice, University of the West Indies, University of California, Washington University, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture as a consortium member of SlaveVoyages, the preeminent online resource for the study of the trade in enslaved Africans across the Atlantic and between ports within the Americas.
Glasgow is a world top 100 university and a member of the prestigious Russell Group of leading UK research universities. As a globally connected university, we work in partnership with others across the world to advance global solutions to real world problems. We are proud to be a founding member of the university networks Universitas 21 and The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities. The University of Glasgow sees membership of Slave Voyages as an important step in developing research and teaching capacity in the fields of slavery and reparations, resulting from the groundbreaking report on the university’s historical links with slavery. After the publication of this report in 2018, the university signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of the West Indies (2019), committing the two universities to work together in research and teaching. This led to the foundation of the Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research and the creation of a one-year Joint Masters Programme in Reparatory Justice. At the same time, the university established a new scholarship program for Black UK-domiciled students to undertake PhD research at Glasgow. The scholarships are named after James McCune Smith, the first African American to be awarded a medical degree, which he received from the University of Glasgow in 1837.
In parallel, the College of Arts & Humanities launched the Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies in October 2020 to promote interdisciplinary collaboration in research, teaching, and public outreach on themes related to slavery and reparations. Among its many activities, the Beniba Centre organizes the annual James McCune Smith lecture, hosts an annual James McCune Smith lecture, hosts an annual Beniba Visiting Research Fellow, co-organises (with the University of Edinburgh) the Teaching Slavery in Scotland programme for high school teachers, and partners with Glasgow City Council Education Services on the project Teaching Glasgow’s Slavery Past to enhance educational practice. Its members include specialists in the history of slavery and the slave trade from History, History of Art, Information Studies, Modern Languages and Cultures, and Literature.
Consortium membership allows the College of Arts & Humanities to make SlaveVoyages an integral part of its research environment, building on the scholarship of historians Shantel George, Stephen Mullen, Christine Whyte, and Jelmer Vos. The University will include database research and website development in applications for PhD and research funding, and in student placement projects.
The University of Glasgow views consortium membership as an opportunity for capacity building in the field of Digital Humanities. Scotland’s role in transatlantic slavery is an important focal point of our research, and we see the study of Scottish participation in the transatlantic and inter-colonial slave trades as a valuable research avenue. Additionally, the University of Glasgow is the first European institution to join the consortium, creating possibilities for American-based consortium partners to collaborate on applications for UK and European Union (Horizon) funding, and an opportunity to interact with local initiatives in curriculum development, such as the development of bespoke lesson plans.
Dr. Shantel George will represent the University of Glasgow in Slave Voyage’s steering committee. George is a Lecturer in Transatlantic Slavery, who joined Glasgow in 2021. George’s research draws extensively on SlaveVoyages to understand the origins and development of African-derived cultures and identities in the British Caribbean, particularly within slavery and post-slavery Grenada. George is also working on a history of the African kola nut, examining its complex history and wide-ranging influence within and between the circum-Caribbean, West Africa, North America, and Europe from 1500 to the present.
Dr. Jelmer Vos will serve on the operational committee. Vos is a Senior Lecturer in Global History, who started at Glasgow in 2018, after moving from Old Dominion University, Virginia. His involvement with SlaveVoyages dates to 2001, when he was a research assistant at the University of Hull, working with the late Prof David Richardson, one of the co-creators of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, the first iteration of SlaveVoyages. Vos has since remained a key contributor and editor of the database, playing an instrumental role in the transition to the first web-based version in 2008. In 2016–17, Vos supervised a team of researchers conducting research in Dutch archives for the Intra-American Slave Trade Database that launched in 2018. Vos works in different languages and his research on the slave trade, and Atlantic history generally, focusses on two African regions: Angola and the Ivory Coast.
Membership of the SlaveVoyages consortium has been generously supported by Library Services, within University of Glasgow’s Information Services.