Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies

Talk: "The Digital Humanities and African American Activism in Glasgow."

Speaker: Hannah-Rose Murray (University of Edinburgh)

Tuesday 8 October 2019 at 5.15.

Venue: Room 202, 4 University Gardens, University of Glasgow.

Throughout the nineteenth century, formerly enslaved African Americans travelled to Glasgow and lectured about U.S. slavery and its legacies. These lectures were held in famous meeting halls, theatres, churches, and the private parlour rooms of wealthy patrons. They wrote and published narratives, stayed with influential reformers, and ensured millions of words were written about them in Scottish newspapers, and beyond. By mapping and visualizing their lecturing tours, the digital humanities can provide us with an alternate approach and offer new insight into how African Americans interacted with the people, networks and landscapes of Scotland, and their radical interventions into the transatlantic landscape. Mapping their lectures also provides us with a visual measure of their impact: whether the venue was a small church in a regional hamlet or a city hall, African American activists made an extraordinary impression on the Scottish people. 

Dr. Hannah-Rose Murray received a Ph.D. from the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham and began a Leverhulme Early Career Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh in September 2019. Her research focuses on recovering and amplifying formerly enslaved African American testimony (including forgotten slave narratives, oratory and visual performance), specifically focusing on their transatlantic journeys to Britain between the 1830s and the 1890s. She has created a Frederick Douglas in Britain dedicated to their experiences and has mapped their speaking locations across Britain, and has organized numerous community events including talks, performances, podcasts, plays and exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic. Her first book, To Tell Our Own Story: African American Transatlantic Activism in the British Isles will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.

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First published: 9 September 2019