Five renowned professors will talk about migration, Empire, slavery and reparations, issues that resonate to this day. Highlights from the series include:

• SLAVERY, MEMORY & REPARATIONS – Monday 14th October, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Using memory scholarship, Professor Olivette Otele will examine how the history and memory of enslavement shaped questions of identity and citizenship in Europe. In Africa, debates about the origins of exclusion in stratified post-slavery societies have been challenging the mechanisms of marginalisation of people of slave descent. In those contexts, the notion of collective memory is a useful tool to understand demands for reparatory justice, and how these can contradict regional or national policies based on the commodification of the colonial past (“dark tourism” in particular).You can reserve your tickets here or at eventbrite

• BLACK TUDORS: THREE UNTOLD STORIES – Thursday 17th October, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Dr Kaufmann tells the intriguing tales of three Africans living in Tudor England – Jacques Francis, a diver employed by Henry VIII to recover guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose; Mary Fillis, a Moroccan woman baptised in Elizabethan London; and Edward Swarthye, a porter who whipped a fellow servant at their master’s Gloucestershire manor house. Their stories illuminate key issues: – how did they come to England? What were their lives like? How were they treated by the church and the law? Most importantly: were they free? Reserve your tickets here

• FREEDOM SONG: THE FISK JUBILEE SINGER’S STORY – Thursday 24th October, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM

A choir of ex-slaves, raising funds to build their University, toured America from 1871, suffering discrimination and hardship. They came to England, were treated with respect and sang to Queen Victoria and Gladstone. Spiritual songs are folk music and belong to us all, but because they came out of such horrific suffering it’s hard to know how to sing them. This lecture by Professor Harvey Brough tells the tale of the singers whose courage and enterprise brought them to the world. The songs they sang include Steal Away to Jesus, Go Down, Moses and Deep River. Register and reserve your tickets at  eventbrite or Gresham College

• SLAVERY AND THE CITY OF LONDON – Monday 28th October, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Freedom has been central to the identity of the City of London for centuries. Professor Richard Drayton informs us that from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth centuries, the African Slave Trade and Plantation Slavery in the Americas were key to London’s banking, insurance, shipping, manufacturing, commodity trades with Europe, gold and silver supply in London, and later merchant banks like Barings, Schroeder and Kleinwort. The City also benefited from the end of Slavery, as compensated emancipation liberated a flood of liquid capital and provided a £500,000 per annum income stream to its funders. Go to  eventbrite to register or reserve your ticket here

All events take place at the Museum of London. A ticket does not guarantee entry. As this is a free event, we over-issue tickets to avoid empty seats. All ticket holders must be seated by 5:50 PM, after which tickets will be reallocated to people queuing for returns.