Professor Benedetta Rossi

On research secondment: 2020-2025

Benedetta Rossi’s research focuses on the African and global history of slavery and other forms of unfreedom, abolition and abolitionism, labour, migration, planned development, and gender in the nineteenth and twentieth century. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Slavery and Abolition in Africa’s Modern History (contracted to CUP). She is the author of From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour, and Ecology in the Nigerien Sahel, 1800-2000 (CUP 2015) and the editor of numerous edited volumes and special issues, including special issues on the legal abolition of slavery in African history (Law & History Review 2024), on slavery and marriage in African societies (Slavery & Abolition 2022, co-edited with Joel Quirk), and on developmentalism, labour, and the slow death of slavery in twentieth century Africa (International Labour and Working Class History Journal 2017). She edited the volumes Les mondes de l’esclavage: une histoire comparée (Seuil 2021, with Paulin Ismard and Cécile Vidal); Landscapes, Sources, and Intellectual Projects in West African History (Brill 2018, with Toby Green); Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Brill 2010, with Anne Haour) and Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories (LUP 2009, 2nd ed. 2016). 

Benedetta has held visiting positions at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Humboldt University of Berlin, the Ecole des École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and China Agricultural University in Beijing. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded research project African Abolitionism: The Rise and Transformations of Anti-Slavery in Africa (AFRAB, ERC-AdG-885418, 2020-2025) and of the AHRC-funded project Legacies of Slavery in Niger (LESLAN, AH/V01210X/1, 2018-2022). She is senior researcher in the ERC-funded project Language as Archive: European Linguistics and the Social History of the Sahara and Sahel in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century (LANGARCHIV, ERC-StG-759390, PI Camille Lefebvre, 2018-2025). 
 

PhD Supervision 

Benedetta supervises students in areas related to the historical experience of coercion, African and global slavery, abolition, and emancipation and free and unfree labour (nineteenth and twentieth centuries).

Current students: 

Sousan Ibrahim, ‘De Facto Refugees or Labour Migrants? A Migrant-centred Historical Study of the Eritrean Diaspora in Jeddah (1970-2010)’; Isaac Crichlow, ‘Black Troops and Resistance in the West India Regiments: Movement, Control and Freedom, 1795-1840’.

Recently completed:

• Eunice Apio, ‘Children Born of War in Northern Uganda: Kinship, Marriage, and the Politics of Post-conflict Reintegration in Lango society’ (PhD, 2016)
• Paul Jacob Naylor, ‘From Rebels to Rulers: Political and Religious Legitimacy in the writings of the Sokoto Fodiawa 1803-1837’ (PhD, 2018)
• Eleanor Seymour, ‘“You are Beaten if you are Bad… You Woman You have Made Your Husband Tired”: Investigating Gender Violence in Northern Uganda’ (PhD, 2020)
• Toni Smith, ‘Colonial Attitudes toward Women, Slavery and Gender Violence in the Congo, 1900-1930s’ (PhD, 2020)
• Irene Kamaratou, ‘Seeking Asylum in Greece: Institutional and Social Responses to African Migrant Women in Athens’ (MA by Research, 2020)
• Sophie Küspert-Rakotondrainy, ‘Transformation of Hierarchies in Western Ethiopia: The Case of the Mao’ (PhD, 2023, winner of the Bradbury Memorial Prize for the best PhD thesis in African Studies) 

Major publications

• Benedetta Rossi, ed., Special Issue: The Abolition of Slavery in Africa’s Legal Histories. The Law & History Review 42, no. 1 (2024).
• Benedetta Rossi and Joel Quirk, eds., Special Issue: Slavery and Marriage in African Societies. Slavery & Abolition 43, no. 2 (2022).
• Paulin Ismard, Benedetta Rossi, and Cécile Vidal, eds., Les Mondes de l'Esclavage: Une Histoire Comparée. Paris: Le Seuil, 2021. 
• Benedetta Rossi, ‘Périodiser la fin de l’esclavage: Le droit colonial, la Société des Nations et la résistance des esclaves dans le Sahel nigérien, 1920-1930’. Les Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, vol. 72 (2018), no. 4, pp. 983-1021.
• Toby Green and Benedetta Rossi, eds., Landscapes, Sources, and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past. Co-edited with Toby Green. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
• Benedetta Rossi, ‘What “Development” Does to Work’. International Labor and Working Class History, vol. 92 (2017), pp. 7-23. Introduction to Special Issue on ‘Developmentalism, Labor, and the Slow Death of Slavery in Twentieth Century Africa’ guest-edited by Benedetta Rossi.   
• Benedetta Rossi, ed. Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2016, paperback edition with new preface (first published 2009).
• Benedetta Rossi, ‘The Agadez Chronicles and Y Tarichi: A Reinterpretation’. History in Africa, vol. 43 (2016), pp. 95-140.
• Benedetta Rossi, From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour, and Ecology in the Nigerien Sahel, 1800-2000. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press (African Studies series), 2015.
• Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi, eds., Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Co-edited with Anne Haour. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

For a full list of publications see Benedetta Rossi’s website. 

Active and recent grants/projects

Major research grants 

• 10/2020-09/2025, European Commission Advanced Grant (ERC), PI: Benedetta Rossi. ‘African Abolitionism: The Rise and Transformations of Anti-Slavery in Africa’ (AFRAB).
• 10/2018-01/2020, AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund, Anti-slavery Knowledge Network Grant, PI: Benedetta Rossi. ‘Legacies of Slavery in Niger: Mobilising Memory, Heritage, and Politics to End Abuse’ (LESLAN). 
• 03/2018-02/2023, European Commission Starting Grant (ERC), PI: Camille Lefebvre.  ‘Hausa and Kanuri Languages as Archive for the History of Sahara and Sahel in 18th and 19th Century’ (LANGARCHIV). Benedetta Rossi is Senior Researcher in the project.

Collaborative and network grants 

• 11/2019-10/2023, EU Horizon 2020 COST CA18205 “Worlds of Related Coercions in Work” (WORCK) 
• 01/2017-05/2021, European Commission Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE), Network Grant, ‘Slavery in Africa: A Dialogue between Europe and Africa’ (SLAFNET). PI: Marie-Pierre Ballarin (Université Côte d’Azur, France). 
• 09/2015-09/2020, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC Canada), Partnership Grant, ‘Conjugal Slavery in War: Partnership for the Study of Enslavement, Marriage, and Masculinities’. PI: Annie Bunting (York, Canada).

Media appearances 

• 2019 ‘Benedetta Rossi : « Au Sahel, l’idéologie qui justifie l’esclavage n’est pas complètement morte »', interview with Benedetta Rossi, Le Monde Afrique, 10 March 2019.
• 2017 ‘The Power of Saviors’, interview with Benedetta Rossi. Published online in the website of Humboldt University (Berlin), 18 December 2017.
• 2017 ‘Modern Slavery, Brexit, Migration, and Development: Connecting the Dots’. Beyond Trafficking and Slavery, an Open Democracy blog, 21 November 2017. 

Teaching

• Slavery and Abolition in Africa, 19th-20th centuries (Masters module)