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

The 2026 UCL History Roundtable on Commemorations, Memory, and the Many Pasts took place on 5th March, 2026. The Head of the History Department, Dr. Antonio Sennis, reminded us about the central role of History in the UCL200 celebrations; the phrase “Here, history happens” is central to the UCL Bicentenary. 

Dr. Sennis asked us to think about the links between our role as historians and the memorialisation of the many pasts in our present times. 

As a community of historians, we all share an interest in the past, in memory, in commemorations, and in the many acts of forgetting. 

We are particularly interested in the processes that shape how societies choose to remember and forget their many pasts. 

And, remembering is not simply an individual act. Instead, the process of commemorating and remembering the many pasts is an essential civic act, even when those pasts are uncomfortable in the present

Margot Finn (FBA, and Astor Professor of British History at UCL) led a tour of the connections between Bloomsbury and the British Empire prior to the establishment of 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, Vanessa Bell (later Bell) and Virginia (later Woolf). 

Professor Finn introduced us 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 née 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, 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. 

Mrs Chitty’s 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. 

Matthew J. Smith (Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery) reflected 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. 

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. 

Professor Smith’s talk addressed this tension inherent in the practice of commemoration by reflecting on the process of national anniversary celebrations in the independent Caribbean. 

Professor Smith shared various 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. 

Professor Smith’s talk explored 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. 

Benedetta Rossi (Professor of History at UCL) reflected on the centenary of the League of Nations’ Slavery Convention (1926) by drawing on her research on the history of slavery and abolitionism in Africa. 

Professor Rossi’s talk explored how 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. 

Professor Rossi’s talk draws on the anniversary of the 1926 Slavery Convention as an opportunity to recognise African anti-slavery activists’ contributions to the abolition of slavery and the defence of its victims. 

Dr. Sennis chaired a roundtable discussion, fielding questions from our audience.

After the roundtable, UCL History hosted a reception, where we had the opportunity to catch up with students, friends, and alumni of the department. Further photos from the event will feature in our alumni newsletter and on our social media.

Photo credit: James Tye Photography