Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin

 

24-25 October 2013

 

Keynote speakers

Dr Nini Rodgers, Queen’s University Belfast

Prof. Richard Blackett, VanderbiltUniversity

Nini Rodgers’ Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 1612-1865 (2007) demonstrated that slavery has had ‘a dramatic impact both on the Irish who emigrated across

the Atlantic and upon the economy at home’. As significantly, for black abolitionists, Ireland occupied an important site both as a place of literal freedom and as a vehicle through which complex questions of race, equality, empire and political subjectivity might be explored. This symposium offers the opportunity to further these discussions, and also to open debate on sometimes neglected relationships between Ireland and Latin America, Africa and India, and on the related complexities, ambivalences and contradictions that the context of empire introduces to discussions of slavery and anti-slavery more broadly.