Clone of [Black Europe]

The [Black Europe] initiative critically interrogates the normative framing of whiteness in European scholarship. Led by the UCL European Institute in collaboration with academic leads Dr. Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach and Dr. Jeff Bowersox, this workstream reimagines inclusive methodologies, decentralises Eurocentric narratives, and foregrounds historically silenced voices to critically reshape discourses on race, identity, and power.

Workstream Rationale

[Black Europe] emerges from a critical recognition of the enduring epistemological frameworks that privilege whiteness as an unmarked category within European studies. While UCL boasts significant interdisciplinary scholarship on race, racialisation, and postcolonial critique - alongside distinguished research on Europe’s history, politics, and cultural production - this workstream confronts the structural omissions and methodological biases that persist in analyses of Europe itself. By interrogating the tacit hierarchies underpinning institutional and intellectual practices, we seek to dismantle the Eurocentric paradigms that obscure racialised power dynamics and their material legacies.

Highlights

Festival of Afro-European Arts, Performance and Scholarship Poster

Festival in June 2024
This festival celebrated Black cultural production and critical inquiry and sought to explore the structures that make Blackness seem natural, self-evident, and variously foreign across Europe.

Revisit the programme

Videos and podcasts

Hearing Ghosts: The Life & Times of Josephine Morcashani

Video short by Graham Riach introducing the international music hall star of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, relating her to the conditions for Black British performance artists today.

Watch

African-American entertainers in pre-jazz Europe

In this Talking Europe podcast, the historian Jeff Bowersox takes us to Central Europe around 1900, where the response to the arrival of Black American entertainers both confirmed and disrupted ideas of race and culture.

Listen

Resources

Access curated resources by the [Black Europe] team

Reading material

Make a suggestion

Black Central Europe

This rich website and international network of historians - of which Jeff Bowersox is managing editor and chief contributor - 'argue[s], quite simply, that Black people have always been a part of Central European history'.

Explore

Black Studies resources in the SSEES Library collections

The contribution of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies' Library’s to the Black Studies LibGuide aims to highlight the increasing interest in researching race, racism and the black diaspora in the context of Slavic and East European Studies.

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Reading Group

The [Black Europe] Reading Group critically examines race, power, and representation in European contexts through interdisciplinary dialogue

Dr. Beatrix Gassmann de Sousa: Affective Debt in Film, 26 February 2025

"Talking Straight to Us": Affective Debt in Film, Karina Griffith, unk.
Bankruptcy of Affect: Blackface in DIE UMZÜGE, Karina Griffith, 2020

Dr. Toyin Agbetu: Decolonisation and DEI Are Dead: Long Live Deracialisation, 5 March 2025

Hall, Stuart. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” In Theories of Race & Racism, edited by Les Back and John Solomos, 144–153. Taylor & Francis Ltd / Books, 1999.
Mbembe, Achille. “The Becoming Black of the World.” In Critique of Black Reason, translated by Laurent Dubois, 1–9. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Prof. Phiroze Vasunia: Andromeda and Representations of Myth, 26 March 2025

Elizabeth McGrath, “The Black Andromeda,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 1–18.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Was Andromeda Black?,” The Root.
“How Andromeda, the Daughter of Ethiopian Royalty, Ended Up White,” The Root.
Optional: Joaneath Spicer, “Heliodorus’s An Aethiopian Story in Seventeenth-Century European Art,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 3: From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 307–35.

Dr. Chloe Ireton: Black Lives and Thought in Early Modern Europe, 7 May 2025

“Coda: Felipa de la Cruz’s World and Letters,” in Ireton Chloe L., Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic. Cambridge University Press; 2025: 252-264.
"Introduction" in The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive, Social Text, Volume 33, Number 4 (125).
Optional: Karen Graubart, Pesa más la libertad: Slavery, Legal Claims, and the History of Afro-Latin American Ideas, William and Mary Quarterly 78:3 (July 2021): 427-58

Coffee/tea will be provided. We will circulate relevant readings and rooms at least one week in advance.

For more information, please contact Olivia Clarkson at olivia.clarkson.23@ucl.ac.uk

Seminar series

Keon West: The Science of Racism, 21 January 2025

Diamond Ashiagbor: EU integration and European colonialism, 10 December 2024

Aissatou Mbodj-Pouye: An Address in Paris, 16 May 2024

James Mark: Wilson's white world: the foundation of Central-Eastern European nation-states after World War I, 12 March 2024

Mame-Fatou Niang: French but not (Q)White: Defining Frenchness for the 21st Century: Prof. Mame-Fatou Niang, 27 February 2024

Rachel Jean-Baptiste: Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood and Citizenship, 5 December 2023

Hans Kundnani: Eurowhiteness, 20 November 2023

Damani Partridge: Blackness as a Universal Claim, 16 October 2023

Black Europe Workshop

Opening workshop featuring Bea Gassman: The 'ideas' of Africa: Four stories & Jeff Bowersox: Performing Blackness for Germans, 13 March 2023

Academic leads

Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach

Jeff Bowersox

Our aims

Academically, we seek to advance critical inquiry into the interconnected constructions of race, modernity, and nationhood within European contexts, while examining their historical entanglements with colonial enterprises and transatlantic slavery. Our work prioritises rigorous analysis of how racial and ethnic identities both shape and are shaped by evolving conceptions of Europe, particularly through legal, intellectual, cultural, and economic frameworks. This mission necessitates continuous reappraisal of core analytical paradigms and active promotion of interdisciplinary dialogue across humanities and social science disciplines.
Structurally, we are committed to cultivating engagement models that harmonise structured scholarly production with organic intellectual exchange. Alongside conventional academic outputs – including lecture series, publications, and funded research initiatives – we aim to establish a dynamic forum for sustained collaboration. This dual approach fosters focused scholarship and serendipitous synergies among UCL researchers and external partners, creating space for emergent ideas and methodologies.
Institutionally, we apply our expertise to advance UCL’s institutional priorities, focusing on three interconnected pillars: supporting the recruitment of 50 Black scholars by 2024, decolonizing European studies curricula, and fostering equity-driven research practices. Our work strengthens early-career researcher development while reimagining institutional frameworks for transnational scholarship. By bridging critical race theory with concrete academic policies, we aim to reshape how UCL approaches research, pedagogy, and collaborative scholarship on Europe.

Meet the intern

Olivia Clarkson is the Project Intern supporting [Black Europe]. Read her profile.