Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talks

The Summer Scholars season of lunchtime talks is hosted by the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the Library and showcases the exciting and wide-ranging research into our Americas collections by the Institute’s Visiting Fellows and associates, as well as Library staff. 

Free. No need to book, just drop-in.

Manumission and morality in eighteenth-century Barbados

What does the 'freeing' of a trafficked African tell us about their 'owners'' feelings about right and wrong in the early modern Caribbean? Looking at sentiments expressed around manumission by some of the richest planters in early modern Barbados, Philip Abraham considers how we might historicize moral thinking about slavery, and what this means for discussions of slavery's legacies today.

The British Library’s Collection of US Underground Comix and Related Ephemera

The British Library houses a rich collection of American underground comix and related ephemera. The holdings are a cornucopia of material for interdisciplinary research examining erotica, comics/x, book dealing, publishing, and illustration, and are important to the study of 20th-century American countercultures, offering socially relevant reflections on subjects that would often be excluded from mainstream publishing, for example sexuality, violence and drug use. Join us as British Library PhD Placement Student, Reed Puc, provides a work-in-progress talk about their investigation into this collection, their findings so far, including collection items of note, and gives an overview of what their completed project will achieve by autumn 2025.

Image: 17th century map of Barbados from a volume of ink wash on paper. British Library. Maps-Sloane, 2441.