Day One: Friday 6 April 2001

9.00am-9.30am: Registration

9.30am: Session One; Race and Colour
Chair: Dr Markman Ellis (Queen Mary, University of London)

Dr Brycchan Carey (Kingston University)
Introduction to the conference
Professor Deirdre Coleman (University of Sydney)
Complexions of Empire: the 'impious art' of whitening in the West Indies
Professor Peter Kitson (University of Dundee)
The Race Issue in the Discourse of Anti-Slavery

11.00am: Coffee

11.30am: Session 2; Parallel Sessions

Drama and the Stage Chair: Dr Sara Salih (University of Kent at Canterbury) Dr Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck College) Slave subjects: the representation of master-slave rape in Behn and Southerne's 'Oroonoko's Hazel Waters (Institute of Race Relations) How Oroonoko became Jim Crow Dr Susan B. Iwanisziw 'And each man finds a Zanga in his heart': A Dramatic Historiography of 18th-Century Representations of Moriscos and North Africans

Faiths and the Faithful Chair: Dr Brycchan Carey (Kingston University) Althea Stewart (Birkbeck College) Discovering Persuasion: the development of a language of negotiation in the writings of three early-modern Quaker women missionaries Dr Bob Tennant (TGWU) The Pulpit and Politics: Beilby Porteus and the Abolition of Slavery Dr Helen Thomas (Queen Mary, University of London) Islam and Christianity in a Pre- and Post-Abolition Context: John Woolman, James Africanus Horton, and Edward Wilmot Blyden

1.00pm: Lunch (own arrangements)

2.00pm: Session 3; Parallel Sessions

The History of Ideas Chair: Dr Markman Ellis (Queen Mary, University of London) Dr Anita Rupprecht (University of Brighton) Adam Smith, Slavery, and the Colonial Aesthetic Richard M. Juang (Cornell) Appetites, Bitterness, Miseries: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the History of Bodies Rev Iain Whyte (University of Edinburgh) By pulpit, platform, pamphlet, and popular magazine. Andrew Thomson of Edinburgh and the 1830 debate on gradual or immediate abolition of slavery

Women, Slavery, and Romanticism Chair: Professor Deirdre Coleman (University of Sydney) Dr Frances Botkin (Towson University, Maryland) Questioning the 'Necessary Order of Things': Maria Edgeworth's 'The Grateful Negro' Dr George Boulukos (Oberlin College, Ohio) The Horror of Hybridity: Enlightenment, Anti-Slavery, and Disgust in Charlotte Smith's 'Story of Henrietta' Dr Lynette Turner (Oxford Brookes University) Black women, white women, and the forms of embodied knowledge in abolition period cross-cultural writing

3.30pm: Coffee

4.00pm: Session 4; Slavery and Audience
Chair: Dr Brycchan Carey (Kingston University)

Dr Marcus Wood (University of Sussex)
Looking for Trouble: Pain, Power, Pornography, and the Representation of the Slave Body
Madge Dresser (University of the West of England)
Slavery Obscured: the Rhetoric of Slavery Bristol Fashion
Professor Johanna M. Smith (Kingston University)
Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Books for Children

5.30pm: Conclusions to day one, followed by reception.

Day Two: Saturday 7 April 2001

9.30 am: Session 1; The Gothic and the Monstrous
Chair: Professor Vincent Carretta (University of Maryland and Visiting Professor, Queen Mary, University of London)

Professor Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent University)
Slaves, Superstitions, and Shamans: Coleridge's 'Ballads' and the Empire of Tyranny
H.J.K. Jenkins (Society for Nautical Research)
French Abolition of Slavery and John Hay's 'Gothic' Memories from the 1790s
Professor Anne K. Mellor (UCLA)
'Frankenstein', Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril

11.00am: Coffee

11.30 am: Session 2; Parallel Sessions

Black Self-Representation Chair: Professor Lyn Innes (University of Kent at Canterbury) Dr Diana Paton (University of Newcastle) The Politics of Authenticity in James Williams's 'A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834' Stephan Meyer (University of Basel) Intersubjectivity as a Theoretical Framework for Reading 'The History of Mary Prince' Dr Sara Salih (University of Kent at Canterbury) 'The History of Mary Prince' and the black canon

Slavery and the Novel Chair: Arthur Torrington (The Equiano Society) Dr Candace Ward (Illinois State University) 'Malignant Dispositions' Tropical Disease, Sensibility, and the West Indian Character in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Writings Dr Jennifer Thorn (Duke University) 'Caressed among the gentlemen': 'Roderick Random', Race, and Romance Dr Mark Stein (Universität des Saarlandes) Who's Afraid of Cannibals: Slavery and Abolition in Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe' and Equiano's 'Interesting Narrative'

1.00pm: Lunch (own arrangements)

2.00pm: Session 3; Parallel Sessions

Poetry and Poetics Chair: Professor Peter Kitson (University of Dundee) Dr Brycchan Carey (Kingston University) Inventing a poetics of antislavery: Thomas Day and John Bicknell's 'The Dying Negro' Dr Conrad Brunstrom (University of Ireland Maynooth) 'Afric's coast I left forlorn': William Cowper and the appropriation of slave-trade imagery Dr Markman Ellis (Queen Mary, University of London) Georgic Poetry and the Problem of Unfree Labour

Image and Iconography Chair: Professor Johanna M. Smith (Kingston University) Joel Helfrich (University of Minnesota) The Image of the 'The Black' in British Art: Tom Molineaux's 1810 and 1811 Title Shots Leo Costello (Bryn Mawr College) A Difficult History and an Uncertain Future: Turner's 'Slave Ship' and the Dynamics of the Sublime Henrice Altink (University of Glamorgan) 'Belly-women and Pickeniny Mummas': language and image in the proslavery discussion about Jamaican slave motherhood, 1770-1838

3.30pm: Coffee

4.00pm: Session 4; Leaving America
Chair: Dr Sara Salih (University of Kent at Canterbury)

Professor Lyn Innes (University of Kent at Canterbury)
Race, Gender, and Genre in Fugitive Slave Narratives
Professor Vincent Carretta (University of Maryland and Visiting Professor, Queen Mary, University of London)
Phillis Wheatley: Bluestocking Poet and Indian Maid

5.00pm: Conclusion: panel discussion.

Chair: Dr Sara Salih. Panel: Professor Vincent Carretta, Professor Lyn Innes, Professor Peter Kitson, Professor Anne K. Mellor

5.30pm: Conference Ends

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The Discourses of Slavery and Abolition Conference was supported by:

The British Academy

The School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London

* This page last updated 14 December 2005 *