PhD scholarship project at the Wilberforce Institute

Maritime Quarantine and Transatlantic Slavery

Application deadline: January 10, 2022

Applications are invited for this PhD scholarship project, working with the renowned Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull, seeking to mine underexplored data within Slave Voyages to analyse what we can learn about maritime solutions in rival European slave trading zones to reduce disease transmission. In the aftermath of COVID 19, such imperative research considers the effectiveness of historic multiracial isolation zones to quarantine diseases, including spaces such as Robben Island in South Africa, slave forts and barracoons along the West Coast of Africa, and the sugar economies in the Caribbean and Latin America. In addition to these land-based strategies for preventing disease transmission, seaborne solutions to curtailing pandemics, both in transit and through floating quarantine in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, will further expand our knowledge of how maritime communities effectively limited transmittable diseases such as cholera, typhus, small pox, and yellow fever in the period of the transatlantic slave trade between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. To broaden the significance of the analysis, a panel of internationally renowned medical, maritime and slavery scholars have also been assembled to support this studentship – thereby ensuring findings have the potential to inform contemporary debates about fighting future disease pandemics.

Apply here

For informal enquiries, please contact Dr Nicholas Evans

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