Book talks
We hear from the authors of important new book releases on the subjects of slavery and colonisation, and look back on landmark publications.
Please note: we have a dedicated section for events that took place during Black History Month.
21 April 2026 - The Bluecoat, Liverpool
CSIS and Liverpool University Press predsented the book Breaking Dead Silence, edited by Christina Horvath and Richard S. White.
Offering diverse perspectives from academics, artists, activists, heritage professionals and tourist guides, the book explores the impacts and legacies of colonisation primarily in Bath and Bristol.
10 March 2026 - 502 Teaching Hub, University of Liverpool
Dr Brian Kwoba celebrated his new book, Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism, 2026 Winner of the Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. The event was hosted by Dr Ama Biney.
5 March 2026 - The Athenaeum, Liverpool
We marked International Women's Day with author Miranda Kaufmann, in conversation with Nasra Elliot (National Museums Liverpool), as they discussed Miranda's new book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery.
25 March 2025 - Online
To mark International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, we were joined by William Jennings, who discussed his latest book, Dibia's World: Life on an Early Sugar Plantation.
23 April 2024 - Online
CSIS in partnership with Liverpool University Press hosted a book talk featuring Professor Martin Munro, Florida State University.
His book explores representations of sounds in contemporary accounts of slavery and revolt in the Caribbean, as a way of understanding the broader “auditory culture” of the enslaved, what it retained from African sources, and how it evolved in the plantations of the Caribbean.
3 May 2023 - The Bluecoat, Liverpool
CSIS and the Liverpool University Press hosted Dr Jane-Marie Collins (University of Nottingham) as she discussed her publication, Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood: Bahia, Brazil, 1830-1888.
Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood examines three major currents in the historiography of Brazilian slavery: manumission, miscegenation, and creolisation. It revisits themes central to the history of slavery and race relations in Brazil, updates the research about them, and revises interpretations of the role of gender and reproduction within them: first, about the preponderance of women and children in manumission; second, about the association of black female mobility with intimate inter-racial relations; third, about the racialised and gendered routes to freed status; and fourth, about the legacies of West African female socio-economic behaviours for modalities of family and freedom in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.
27 June 2022 - School of the Arts Library, University of Liverpool
In this CSIS public talk, acclaimed historian Dr Kris Manjapra (Tufts University) discussed his publication, Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation. Ranging across the Americas, Europe and Africa, Manjapra unearths disturbing truths about the Age of Emancipations, 1780-1880.
10 May 2022 - The Kuumba Imani Millenium Centre, Liverpool
CSIS, in partnership with Liverpool University Press, held a public talk with Dr Jessica Moody, University of Bristol.
The Persistence of Memory: Remembering slavery in Liverpool, ‘slaving capital of the world’ is a history of the public memory of transatlantic slavery in the largest slave-trading port city in Europe, Liverpool, from the end of the 18th century into the 21st century. Mapping this public memory over more than two centuries reveals the ways in which dissonant pasts, rather than being ‘forgotten histories’, persist over time as a contested public debate.
17 November 2021 - Online
The Centre for the Study of International Slavery and Liverpool University Press hosted Professor John Oldfield, who talked about his book, The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c.1820-1865.
The Ties that Bind is an innovative study that explores the close affinities between anti-slavery activists in Britain and the USA during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, shedding important new light on the emergence of a vibrant and broad-based political culture that forced abolition to the centre of public debate.
1-3 November 2019 - Merseyside Maritime Museum
A program put together by the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the Centre for the Study of International Slavery at the University of Liverpool, and the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation.
Its keynote events included 'The Getting Word Project: Beyond Labour and Commodity', and 'Monticello and the Legacies of Slavery' with Leslie Greene Bowman (President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation).