Transatlantic Abolition and Law

Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is the author of the Wolfson History Prize and Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize shortlisted book Black Tudors: The Untold Story (2017). She read History at Christ Church, Oxford and is now an Honorary Fellow of the University of Liverpool, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she co-convenes the 'What's Happening in Black British History?' workshop series with Michael Ohajuru. She is currently working on her second book, Heiresses: The Caribbean Marriage Trade; as Lead Historian for the Colonial Countryside project;  taking her work into schools with her Teaching Black Tudors project; and to the world with her new FutureLearn Black Tudors: The Untold Story course. www.mirandakaufmann.com

John W. Cairns is Professor of Civil Law at the University of Edinburgh. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, his research has mainly focused on the history of Scots law (particularly legal literature, legal education, and the legal profession in the eighteenth century), slavery and the law (particularly in the eighteenth century), and the legal history of Louisiana and Quebec. He is especially interested, first, in the influence of Smithian historical thinking on the development of academic legal education in Scotland and, second, in how enslavement was managed in eighteenth-century Scotland.

Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Founding Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic world. Brown is the author of numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he is Principal Investigator and Curator for the animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2013), and he was Producer and Director of Research for the award-wining television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), broadcast nationally on season 11 of the PBS series Independent Lens. His first book, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008), was co-winner of the 2009 Merle Curti Award and received the 2009 James A. Rawley Prize and the 2008-09 Louis Gottschalk Prize. His most recent book is Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020), which was awarded the 2021 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the 2021 Elsa Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians, and the 2020 Sons & Daughters of United States Middle Passage Phillis Wheatley Book Award for Non-Fiction Research, and was a co-winner of the 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Award for non-fiction and a finalist for the 2020 Cundill History Prize. 

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. She taught at the University of Massachusetts for over twenty years where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), which was named one of the ten best books on slavery by Politico in 2015 and featured in The New York Times's The 1619 Project. Her recent book, the multiple-award winning The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) was long listed for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. She is the author and editor of numerous other books and articles. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and two from the Mellon Foundation. A historian of the long nineteenth century, her research interests lie specifically in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is currently writing a book on the Reconstruction of American democracy after the Civil War under contract with Liveright (WW Norton).