Research Seminar
QMCECS offers a programme of early evening seminars with speakers from a range of disciplines. We have six seminars a year, and recent speakers have included Rebecca Anne Barr (Cambridge), Nigel Leask (Glasgow), and Fara Dabhoiwala (Princeton).
For a list of speakers in the last five years see the seminar archive.
2026 / 2027 Programme
22 September. Damiano Bardelli (Oxford), 'Contesting Poverty in Enlightenment Europe'
20 October: Miles Ogborn (QMUL), ‘Law, Violence and Empire: understanding the Jamaican uprising trials of 1832’
This paper examines the movements and uses of information about the trials and punishments following the 1831-32 uprising in Jamaica in order to investigate the relationship between law, violence and empire in the age of abolition. The largest uprising of enslaved people in the British empire resulted in the trials of hundreds of enslaved men and women by both military and civil courts, and hundreds of death sentences being carried out. This came after several years in which questions of law and violence were a key part of the contest over slavery in Jamaica and in Britain. Examining the ways in which these trials were undertaken and documented, and tracing how that documentation moved, changed, and was assessed and deployed by government officials and abolitionists (and those who were both) in and between Jamaica and Britain, shows how understandings of these trials and the (il)legitimacy of the violence they meted out contributed to shaping the context for the passing of the Emancipation Act in 1833. It also generates further reflection on the making and uses of slavery’s archives.
17 November: Open Symposium
1 December (Week 11): Jacob Chatterjee (Oxford), ‘English Philosophical Hedonism, and the Development of Ideas of Happiness in Western Europe, 1689-1785’
2 February (Week 2): Hannah Murphy (KCL)
16 March (Week 8): Meleisa Ono-George (Oxford)
30 March (Week 10): Will Bowers (QMUL)
13 April (Week 12): Katie Mennis (Cambridge)
All seminars Tuesdays 17:15–19:00 unless otherwise stated.
Location: QMUL Mile End Campus. Francis Bancroft Building, 3. 18.