The Sixth Annual King's Gollancz Lecture: Marisa J. Fuentes.

The Centre for Early Modern Studies at King's College London (CEMS KCL) is delighted to announce that the sixth annual Gollancz Lecture will be delivered by Professor Marisa J. Fuentes. The lecture will be held in the Council Room, Strand Campus on Monday 13 June at 5.30pm BST and will be followed by a drinks reception in the Somerset Room. It will also be streamed online, for those at a distance.

“Buried ‘Without Care’: Social Death, Discarded Lives, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade”  

Reading through select documents from early Portuguese and English "slave trading," this talk thinks through the concept of "social death," that historians and critical Black studies scholars employ or challenge to understand slavery and its afterlife. With particular attention to the category of "refuse slaves" attached to African captives who sometimes did not survive the arrival and sale in Atlantic ports, I consider the limits of language, narrative, and disciplines in attending to those who lingered towards and succumbed to the violence of the transatlantic slave trade.

Marisa J. Fuentes is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and History; and Presidential Term Chair in African American History, 2017-2022, at Rutgers University.

She is the author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) which won both the Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize and the Berkshires Conference of Women’s Historians First Book Prize. She has written a number of articles, book chapters, and book reviews, including “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachel Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive,” which won the Andres Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize. She is also the co-editor of Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, Volume I (Rutgers University Press, 2016), and the ‘Slavery and the Archive’ special issue in History of the Present (November 2016).

The annual King's Gollancz Lecture celebrates the life and work of former King's Professor of English Sir Israel Gollancz, medievalist, Shakespearean and founding member of both the British Academy and the English Association. The lecture is organised by the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS), the London Shakespeare Centre (LSC), and the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies (CLAMS) in rotation. This year it is the turn of CEMS.