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Black Victorians: Hidden in History Keshia N. Abraham and John Woolf
Event details
Black History Month Lecture
Beyond the vision of Victorian Britain traditionally advanced in our textbooks, there always existed another, more diverse Britain, populated by people of colour marking achievements both ordinary and extraordinary.
Drawing upon the extensive research in their book Black Victorians: Hidden in History, Keshia N. Abraham and John Woolf will guide us through the archives to recentre our attention on marginalised Black Victorians, from leading medic George Rice to political agitator William Cuffay to abolitionists Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Sarah Parker Remond; from pre-Raphaelite muse Fanny Eaton to renowned composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. While acknowledging the paradoxes of Victorian views of race, this talk will demonstrate how Black people were visible and influential, firmly rooted in British life.
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About the speakers
For over three decades, Dr. Keshia Abraham has engaged in the art of global learning as a Student, Researcher, Professor, Program Director, Academic Dean, Practitioner, Facilitator, Dramaturg, Consultant, and Artist.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA), she has lived and worked all over the African Diaspora. Keshia earned a PhD in Comparative Literature with an emphasis on Postcolonial literature, Autobiography, Africana Studies, and Popular Education at Binghamton University and her Bachelor’s degree in English (emphasis on Women’s Studies) at Spelman College.
A two-time Fulbright fellow, Dr. Abraham is a published author and co-editor of the forthcoming Forum on Education Abroad publication, The Half Yet to Be Told: Study Abroad at HBCUs. Earlier publications include Caribbean Woman Writer as Scholar: Creating, Imagining, Theorizing and several essays in a variety of edited collections.
Dr John Woolf is an Irish-British historian, researcher and lecturer. He was born and raised in North London and graduated from the University of Cambridge, with two scholarships to his name, before winning two further scholarships at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was awarded his PhD on nineteenth-century history. Since then John has worked on numerous projects exposing history’s hidden stories. He has recently written The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age, which was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize, and has co-written the bestselling audiobooks Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets and The Halifax Slasher. John has worked across TV, radio and film; he has written for a range of outlets and appeared on numerous radio and podcast channels. He currently lectures at Hult International Business School and is an elected Councillor in London.