The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery hosted the inaugural Elsa Goveia public lecture at UCL on 18 May 2022. Our inaugural speaker was Professor Jennifer L. Morgan, whose lecture, entitled 'The Measure of their Sadness: Slavery and Private Life in the Early Black Atlantic', is now available to view in full on the CSLBS YouTube channel here. Our sincere thanks go both to Cameron Christie for his editing work and to Professor Morgan for her inspiring talk.
About the speaker
Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and is the author of the prize-winning Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021), Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and numerous other publications. Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in the Black Atlantic.
Professor Morgan is the inaugural Elsa Goveia Speaker at the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, UCL.
Elsa V. Goveia
Elsa V. Goveia (1925-1980) read History at UCL from 1945-1948 where she was one of the first West Indian students to have studied in the department. In 1947 she won the Pollard Prize for English history in 1947, becoming the first West Indian to do so. After completing her PhD at the University of London in 1952 she was to become the first woman appointed as a professor at the newly created University College of the West Indies (UCWI) and the first Caribbean-born professor of West Indian studies in the UCWI History Department. For three decades she taught History there and was responsible for a pioneering course on Caribbean History while undertaking foundational work in the understanding of ‘slave societies’. Among her publications were A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies to the end of the nineteenth century (1956) and Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (1965).
1761 - ????
"Free quadroon woman" and mother of eleven children; independently wealthy, perhaps through legacies left her by her partners James Tierney (died 1784) and Ebenezer Robertson (died 1825).
Document comprises 4 parts, written recto and verso across 5 folios: 1. An inventory and valuation of enslaved persons at Windsor Estate, St Elizabeth parish, Jamaica, 1814. 2. An inventory and valuation of enslaved persons at Williamsfield settlement, St Elisabeth parish, Jamaica, 1814. 3. An inventory of animals at Windsor Estate, St Elizabeth parish, Jamaica, 1814. 4. A cover note outlining the contents of the document.
