Reclaiming Narratives: Making Black British History Sources More Discoverable

Date: Wednesday 2^nd October

Time: 2:30-4:30pm

Location: Room LT B10, Hatherly Labs, Streatham Campus, University of Exeter

 Are you passionate about studying Black British history at the University of Exeter? Do you want to make a difference and help improve the way our institution foregrounds historical Black voices in our curriculum?

Come along to this workshop to explore the challenges of discovering Black British histories within archives, and help identify and showcase these histories in the library's digital collections. Together, we’ll create a new Black British History online guide to share these important histories.

The first half of the session will feature a discussion with Dr Ryan Hanley (Archaeology and History), who has just completed a biography of British-Jamaican, 19^th-century radical abolitionist Robert Wedderburn. Dr Hanley is a foremost expert on Black British History, and his research engages with archival material and the problems faced by researchers as we try to overcome the biases which can structure archives.

We’ll also be joined by AM Digital, one of our digital Heritage database providers, to provide a publishers’ perspective on the discovery and digitisation of Black British histories.

In the second half of the workshop, Nicki Nye will provide hands-on training, as you help us recover sources which reveal Black experiences, thus decolonising the library records at the University of Exeter. With her expert guidance, you will search across our online collections to find these hidden Black British histories and showcase them, thereby contributing towards the creation of a new Black British History libguide, which will help students and researchers at all levels.

Dr Ryan Hanley (Senior Lecturer) is a historian of race and slavery in modern Britain, with particular interests in the contributions and perspectives of people of African descent and the intersection of race and class, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

Nicki Nye (Academic Liaison Librarian) provides information and research skills training and support to students, researchers and academics across a range of HASS subjects  (Archaeology & History/Communications, Drama & Film/Languages, Cultures & Visual Studies), and Engineeri