2024 – 25 F. E. L. Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas

Please join University College for the 2024-25 Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas, Three Island Overtures presented by Matthew J. Smith, Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. These lectures will consider time and memory in Caribbean History by drawing on the lessons, research, and experiences of Professor Smith’s professional career as a Caribbean historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In each lecture, he is concerned with how Caribbean people remember their past. Each of the lectures treats with an historical theme and moment that he has studied closely, when a collective memory was shaped and then told as a national story.

The three lectures are bound by a central question: If, as Caribbean artists have long demonstrated, the story of the Caribbean is a struggle of memories, then how might the history of the islands be approached differently if we consider the politics of how these memories are made and then projected through generations and carried by its people to other places? The Priestley lectures will collectively attend to this question through the lens of three distinct and interrelated movements in the course of the great sea of Caribbean History.

Registration is required to view these lectures and seating is limited for in-person attendance. For in-person registrations, registering for one lecture will not grant a seat at the other lectures. Please submit an individual registration form for each guest who plans to attend and be sure to register for every day/lecture of interest. 

Details:

Hybrid Lecture Series 

November 12, 4:30-6:00 p.m., In person and online (followed by a reception)
November 13, 4:30-6:00 p.m., In person and online
November 14, 4:30-6:00 p.m., In person and online