Faculty of Social Sciences Black History Month Lecture 2018

The Unfinished Revolution: Haiti, Black Sovereignty and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Speaker: Dr Karen Salt, Centre for Research in Race and Rights, University of Nottingham

Date: Thursday 25 October

Time: 12.30pm to 2pm

Venue: MH002, Mary Seacole Building, City Campus North, WV1 1AD

About the speaker

Dr Karen Salt is Assistant Professor in Transnational American Studies and directs the Centre for Research in Race and Rights at the University of Nottingham. She directs the Black Studies PhD programme at the University of Nottingham and has just welcomed the second cohort of postgraduates.

She is an expert on sovereignty, race, collective activism and systems of governance. Dr Salt is an interdisciplinary scholar with strong interests in transnational American Studies and Afrodiasporic studies. A significant portion of her work investigates how black nation-states have fought for their continued existence within a highly racialised world. As this work has developed, Dr Salt has considered the relationship of sovereignty and race to environmental consumption and protection, enabling her to craft new research on racial ecologies. In addition to this work, she currently leads or co-leads projects on reparative trust, collective activism, racial equity and transformative justice politics. Dr. Salt’s latest book, The Unfinished Revolution: Haiti, Black Sovereignty and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World will shortly be published by Liverpool University Press.

Dr Salt sits on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Advisory Board. She has recently been appointed Deputy Chair of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)'s External Advisory Group for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

About the lecture

In this lecture Dr. Salt addresses post-revolutionary (and contemporary) sovereignty in Haiti. Drawing upon an archive of black politics, the lecture examines the charged upheaval that Haiti’s arrival caused in the Atlantic world. Salt revisits this site of contestation in order to critically reflect on the ways that brokers from Haiti and across the Atlantic responded to the political existence of a nation forged from the fires of revolution and consistently racialized as black by other nation-states.

The lecture will be chaired by Dr. Shirin Housee, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, and author of Speaking Out against Racism in the University Space (2018).

Further information

For further information please contact Dr. Richard Hawkins, Department of History, Politics & War Studies at r.a.hawkins@wlv.ac.uk or Dr Shirin Housee at s.housee@wlv.ac.uk.

No booking required. Lecture open to all.