Mary Stevens Reckford Memorial Lecture in European Studies

Howard University professor Ana Lucia Araujo will deliver the 2023 Mary Stevens Reckford Memorial Lecture in European Studies on Feb. 23 with a presentation titled “Slavery as History and Memory.”

The lecture will examine the recent international developments surrounding the fall of pro-slavery monuments and demands of symbolic and material reparations for slavery and colonialism. By exploring the history of the public debates about slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, the lecture aims to illuminate why and how these debates have gained growing importance in the public sphere and the public space over the past ten years not only in the United States but also in other slave societies and societies that were deeply involved in perpetuating these human atrocities.

Ana Lucia Araujo is a full professor in the department of history of historically black Howard University in Washington DC. Her work explores the history and memory of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. Her work has also explored the visual culture and material culture of slavery and the history of symbolic and material reparations for slavery. She authored or edited thirteen books on these topics. Her three recent single-authored books include Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (2020), Museums and Atlantic Slavery (2021), and Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (2017).

Since 2017, she is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. She serves on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review (the flagship journal of the American Historical Association), the editorial board of the journal Slavery and Abolition and the editorial review board of the African Studies Review. Her current book projects are Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery in the Americas (under contract with the University of Chicago Press) and The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (under contract with Cambridge University Press).

Her work has been recently funded by a fellowship from the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study (through the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation), Princeton, NJ, a Franklin Research Grant of the American Philosophical Society, and a Getty Residential Scholar Grant at the Getty Center by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California, where she will be in residence from January to June 2023.

The Institute hosts the annual Mary Stevens Reckford Memorial Lecture in European Studies, established in 1990 by UNC Classics Professor Kenneth J. Reckford to honor his wife, Mary Stevens Reckford (February 25, 1934 – November 12, 1987). The lecture is designed to appeal to the public, rather than specialists. Speakers are asked to provide “pleasure, instruction, an interdisciplinary approach and a sense of shared humanity.”