Call for Papers: Ireland, Slavery, Antislavery, Empire Symposium

University College Dublin, 28-30 October, 2013

Confirmed Keynotes:

• Richard Blackett, Vanderbilt University
• Nini Rodgers, Queens University, Belfast

Call for Papers:

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, freedom, 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, Brazil, Africa or India, and to the related complexities, ambivalences and contradictions that the context of empire introduces to discussions of slavery and anti-slavery more broadly.

Ireland, slavery, anti-slavery, empire invites papers or panels from across the humanities and social sciences, and from Hispano, luso, franco and Anglophone areas of scholarship, focused on the relationship between Ireland, slavery, and ethical culture in the context of empire(s) from the 17th into

the early 20th century. We also welcome papers on the memory, representation and challenges of that relationship in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

• Revolution or rebellion
• Slavery in Irish literature or Ireland in Black literature
• The archive
• The Congo
• The Caribbean, Africa, Indian, Latin America and Ireland
• Missionaries
• emancipation
• Collection and curation
• Labour
• War and military service
• American slavery
• Religion 
• Black activism and imperial space
• Death
• Travel writing/Exploration
• The raced/gendered body
• Slavery, empire and visual culture
• Whiteness
• Emigration/colonisation
• Kinship
• Remembering or forgetting slavery, including contemporary slavery, and empire.

Abstracts of c 200 words, and a brief biography,  should be sent to Fionnghuala Sweeney, Maria Stuart or Fionnuala Dillane by 16 June, 2013. Papers should be in English and of no more than 20 minutes duration.