2026 UCL History Roundtable on ‘Commemorations, Memory, and the Many Pasts'

As UCL marks its 2026 Bicentenary, the History Department is delighted to invite colleagues, students, alumni and history enthusiasts to a roundtable with UCL Historians on Commemorations, Memory, and the Many Pasts.

Join us for an evening of discussion and reflection as UCL Historians explore how societies remember, commemorate, and negotiate their pasts.

Professor Margot Finn FBA will open the conversation with a tour of the connections between Bloomsbury and the British Empire prior to the establishment of UCL. 

Professor Matthew J. Smith will reflect on his experience as a historian participating in commemorative events across the Caribbean, with a talk entitled Misremembered: The Uneasy Presence of the Past at Commemorative Moments. 

Professor Benedetta Rossi will share reflections on the centenary of the League of Nations’ Slavery Convention (1926), drawing on her research on the history of slavery and abolitionism in Africa. 

The roundtable will be chaired by Dr Antonio Sennis, Head of Department and Associate Professor of Medieval History. We warmly invite colleagues, students, alumni, and history enthusiasts, near and far, to join us for this opportunity to reflect together on commemorations within our historical community. 

The roundtable will be followed by a drinks reception where conversations can continue in a more informal environment. 

Schedule

• 6-7.30 pm: 2026 UCL History Roundtable: Commemorations, Memory and the Many Pasts
• 7.30-8.30 pm: Drinks Reception in the Roberts Building Foyer

Programme

Professor Matthew J. Smith on: “Misremembered: The Uneasy Presence of the Past at Commemorative Moments”

What practices do we activate when we choose to commemorate the past? Remembering is never only about marking what occurred; it is equally, and perhaps more importantly, about how we have been taught to engage with an event or time before ours. And those traditions contain transgenerational expectations. For the postcolonial world these traditions are inheritances from elsewhere. The object of remembering might change but the mode and form of how we commemorate are often the same. The replacement of a colonial era statue with a celebrated figure of anticolonial resistance in the Global south creates a sense of national belonging but it does so by replicating the same way the past is expected to be commemorated. This contribution addresses this tension inherent in the practice of commemoration by reflecting on the process of national anniversary celebrations in the independent Caribbean. Special attention will be given to personal experience as a professional historian who has worked on bicentenary celebrations of the Haitian Revolution in 2004 and close study of the centenary celebrations of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1965. It will discuss how the celebratory form of commemorative moments by their nature involves a conscious forgetting of crucial aspects of the past and an undermining of the imbalances of power in the present. 

Professor Margot Finn (FBA), on “Bloomsbury, Gower Street, and the British Empire before the UCL.” 

Like many people who have never studied at UCL, many of us in and of the UCL History Department think of Bloomsbury as a place of radical thinking and modernity. This association nicely captured by the Department’s physical location diagonally across the Square from the flat previously inhabited by ‘Bloomsbury Group’ artists and writers such as the Stephen sisters, Vaness (later Bell) and Virginia (later Woolf). In this talk I’d like to introduce you to a much earlier ‘Bloomsbury Group’, one that predates the establishment of UCL by just under half a century. Who lived on Gower Street before it was the entrance to UCL? We can begin to answer that question by reading the correspondence and daily diary of ‘Mrs’ Chitty of Gower Street in the 1780s. Of Huguenot stock, Mrs Chitty was the cousin of Eliza Davidson nee Pigou, the wife of a senior East India Company merchant and civil servant. For over a decade, Mrs Chitty raised the Madras-born children of her cousin Eliza, schooling them in Englishness (and Britishness) in preparation for military lives and marriages in India. Through the daily diary she sent Eliza at intervals, we can see Gower Street as a hub of both Britain’s Atlantic and its Indian empire, following Mrs Chitty and her gaggle of Davidson children into the homes of EIC officials and Caribbean slave-owning MPs in Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia. Her letters and diaries help reveal Gower Street as a staging-point of empire, channelling family members from the Highlands through Bloomsbury to West and East Indian lives and fortunes. Thinking about Bloomsbury’s pre-UCL imperial histories can help us to contextualise discussions of its Victorian engagements with empire, race and colonial institutions.

Professor Benedetta Rossi on “The 100th anniversary of the League of Nations’ Slavery Convention 1926: perspectives from African history”

The 1926 Slavery Convention had significant global consequences. Its definition of slavery shaped international anti-slavery legislation and fuelled anti-slavery movements worldwide. Its influence is still felt today. Developed at the height of colonial rule in Africa, the Convention was the work of jurists, activists and administrators representing Europe’s main colonial empires. They considered it their mission to abolish slavery in Africa and the colonised world, but they did not view Africa’s history as a source of humanitarian inspiration. And yet, since long before colonial occupation, African anti-slavery activists have been using their knowledge and energy to promote the suppression of slavery at local and international levels. This short talk will use the anniversary as an opportunity to recognise their contributions to the abolition of slavery and the defence of its victims. 

About the Speakers

Professor Matthew J. Smith

Matthew J. Smith is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. Prior to this, Professor Smith worked at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica where he was Professor of Caribbean History. He has special interest in the nineteenth and twentieth-century histories of Haiti and Jamaica. Among his publications is Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), a comparative study which explored the post-slavery intersections between the two Caribbean neighbours with a focus on overlapping narratives and shared migration histories. His earlier book, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political Change, 1934-1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) studied the activities of radical political groups that emerged after the US Occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and prior to the establishment of the dictatorship of François Duvalier in 1957. 

Professor Margot Finn, FBA

Margot is an historian of modern Britain (Britain since 1750), with a predominant focus on the period to 1914. Her previous work has ranged from the history of Victorian popular politics to the gendered legal, social and cultural histories of debt and credit in England. She now researches, teaches and supervises predominantly in topics relating to British colonial and imperial history, with particular emphasis on the family, gender, material culture and transnational encounters. In 2018, UCL Press published an open access volume of essays (co-edited with Kate Smith) from Margot’s Leverhulme Trust-funded research project The East India Company at Home. Her current monograph project is entitled, ‘Imperial Family Formations: Domestic Strategies and Colonial Power in British India, c.1757-1857’.

Professor Benedetta Rossi

Benedetta Rossi’s research focuses on the African and global history of slavery and other forms of unfreedom, abolition and abolitionism, labour, and migration in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Her manuscript entitled Slavery and Abolition in African History since 1800 is forthcoming in the New Approaches to African History Series of Cambridge University Press. She is the author of From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour, and Ecology in the Nigerien Sahel, 1800-2000 (CUP 2015), which was Finalist for the 2016 Melville J. Herskovits Award and the 2016 Fage and Oliver Prize award. Benedetta 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, 2020-2026) and of the AHRC-funded project Legacies of Slavery in Niger (LESLAN, AH/V01210X/1, 2018-2022).