Dr Michelle Liebst
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and historian of East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania) on the ERC-funded project, African Abolitionism: The Rise and Transformations of Anti-Slavery in Africa (AFRAB). My work has focused on contextualising the anti-slavery legal documents and compiling biographical accounts of intermediaries involved in the ending of slavery.
I completed my doctorate at the University of Cambridge. My thesis was a labour history of a Christian mission (the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa in Zanzibar and Tanganyika). Between 2018 and 2019 I taught at the University of Birmingham, assisting with the module ‘Slavery and Freedom in Twentieth Century Africa’. In 2020, after a period of parental leave, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where I developed my first book manuscript. My first book, Labour and Christianity in the Mission, was published in 2021 by James Currey.
Major publications
- ‘Urban East African Slavery.’ In D. Pargas, J. Schiel (Eds.), Palgrave Handbook on Global Slavery. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
- With Felicitas Becker. ‘Routes to Emancipation in East Africa.’ In Martin Klein and Benedetta Rossi (eds) Oxford Encyclopedia of Slavery, Slave Trade, and the Diaspora. Oxford University Press, 2022.
- With J. Chesworth. ‘The Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) and Islam.’ In D. Thomas and J. Chesworth (eds), Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 19. Africa and South America (1800-1914). Brill, 2022.
- Labour and Christianity in the Mission: African Workers in Tanganyika and Zanzibar, 1864-1926. James Currey, 2021.
- ‘Sin, Slave Status and the City in Zanzibar, 1864-c.1930.’ African Studies Review, 60 (April, 2017): 139-160.
- ‘African Workers and the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa in Zanzibar, 1864–1900.’ Journal of Eastern African Studies 8, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 366–81.
Email: m.liebst@ucl.ac.uk
Telephone: 020 3108 7953 (internal 07953)
Office: G07, 25 Gordon Square
Twitter: @MGLiebst
Qualifications
PhD Cambridge