A fellow’s forum with Louise Sebro, Curator at The Reventlow Museum, Denmark from October 26, 2023.
About the Presentation
Sebro's research project ‘Freedom!’ focuses on two men: the Danish nobleman Christian Reventlow and Thomas Jefferson, born five years apart and of very similar backgrounds. The project seeks to compare the two men, their intellectual inspirations and their position between ideals for the future, and the material realities that underpinned their elite lives. Through the comparison she will create a better understanding of how the ideals of personal freedom that drove them, could function alongside their lived lives based upon systems of slavery, colonialism, and premodern feudal notions of difference between the three estates of society. The scope of the project is to develop a narrative, where Jefferson can be used as an international reference in which Reventlow can be mirrored in order to better understand the complexity of his life. Sebro's stay at the ICJS will mark the beginning of the project, and will be used to formulate questions, rather than to give answers. The project will lead to the creation of a new exhibition at the Reventlow Museum and a publication.
About Louise Sebro
Louise Sebro is a Danish historian, who has worked within the the two fields of colonial and manorial history. Her doctoral dissertation (2010) focused on ethnic identities and social networks among African Caribbeans in the Danish West Indies, and since then she has worked in different museums focusing on cultural life, networks, identities and power relations. She has spent ten years at the Danish National Museum as a researcher and curator focusing on histories of the Caribbean, West Africa and Southern India. She is now curator at the manor house museum, The Reventlow Museum, which focuses on the great reformist period of the late 18th century and life within the economic, cultural, and intellectual elite.