Professor Ana Lucia Araujo will present her new book, The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press). The Gift explores how objects of prestige contributed to cross-cultural exchanges between Africans and Europeans during the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing on a rich set of sources in French, English, and Portuguese, as well as artifacts housed in museums across Europe and the Americas, Ana Lucia Araujo illuminates how luxury objects impacted European-African relations, and how these economic, cultural, and social interactions paved the way for the European conquest and colonization of West Africa and West Central Africa.
Ana Lucia Araujo is an American historian and Professor of History at the historically black Howard University in Washington DC, United States. She specializes in the history and memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and is interested in the visual and material culture of slavery. She has been a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Project Routes of Enslaved Peoples since 2017. She has received several awards including a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, New Jersey), where she was in residence in the Spring 2022, and a Senior Scholar Grant from the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, California) where she was in residence from January to June 2023. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London, UK. She has served on the Board of Editors of the journals American Historical Review, Slavery and Abolition, and African Studies Review. She is the author or editor of fifteen books. In addition to The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a new revised and expanded edition of her book Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (2017), is coming out in 2023.
The workshop is open to all members of the BCDSS, including Ph.D. candidates and M.A. students.
This workshop series is organised by the Research Group "The Concept of Slavery in African History".
Mary Afolabi
Boluwatife Akinro
Ricardo Márquez García
Jutta Wimmler
Lukas Wissel