Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive

Funded in collaboration by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2022-2024)

The creation of an interactive website that brings together collections in the United States and United Kingdom to facilitate scholarship on colonialism and indentureship by Eddie Bruce-Jones and Tao Leigh Goffe. The lead UK partner is Birkbeck College, University of London. Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive' aims to provide proof-of-concept for the development of an integrated humanities, law and social science archive. By creating a carefully curated, interactive digital website, it aims to increase public engagement with specialist research, generate new interdisciplinary scholarship on colonialism, and provide a method for cultural institutions to frame specialist collections to increase public interest and use of the collections. This project curates various digital and physical holdings of the University of London and Cornell University library systems, in collaboration with public archives and galleries, and aims to demonstrate that, by overlapping and digitally integrating holdings on the indentureship period that would not typically be read or viewed alongside one another--such as maps, statutes, court judgments, land registers, ship logs, indenture contracts, novels, music, studies in linguistics, and oral histories.

Keynote Address by Drs. Tao Leigh Goffe and Eddie Bruce-Jones at Stanford University, May 17, 2023, Caribbean Epistemologies.

View the video below.

Spring 2024 Research Associates, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

Morgan DaCosta (Left)

is a doctoral candidate in international relations at the University of Oxford. Her DPhil research draws on archival resources to produce a genealogy of policing from the end of British slavery in 1838 until the early 21st century in Jamaica and Trinidad. She conceptualises police power as a form of reiterative violence used to reproduce slavery-era and colonial social order in postcolonial former slave societies. Previously, she worked for Human Rights Watch researching abuses by security forces and human trafficking in the Sahel, and was a Fulbright scholar in Senegal examining urban women’s political activism. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Deanna Lyncook (Center)

is a PhD History student at Queen Mary University of London. Her research takes a transnational approach to the experiences of Caribbean children in the British education system in Britain and its Caribbean colonies, in the second half of the 20th Century. It explores the migration experiences of Caribbean children through oral history. She is the founder host of the weekly podcast The History Hotline where she discusses events and individuals that have shaped Black history in Britain and the Caribbean. She has worked in public history and heritage spaces as an oral history and project officer at the Museum of Methodism, curating an exhibition on Black and Asian leaders in British Methodism. She has also worked on historical research projects for the Society for Caribbean Studies, the University of Leeds, BBC Radio London and the Times Radio. She also co-organised ‘The Issue of Truth’ a Black British History Conference with Olivia Wyatt.