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Conference: Medicine, Slavery, and Race in the Atlantic World


After four full years, the initial funded stage of Medicine and the Making of Race comes to a close in September 2025. To mark its completion, we are delighted to announce our capstone conference: Medicine, Slavery, and Race in the Atlantic World, taking place on 15-17th May 2025 at King’s College London's Strand Campus. Featuring 7 panels across 3 days, plus lightening talks from ECRs, see the full programme here. Book to attend in person here.

Since the seminal work of Todd Savitt and Sharla Fett, scholarship on the relationship between slavery and medicine has been a longstanding subject of historical inquiry. Recent years have seen this work pick up pace, with critical contributions from Rana Hogarth, Suman Seth, Andrew Curran, and a recent collection of essays edited by Sean Morey Smith & Christopher Willoughby.

This scholarship has situated medicine more specifically in the realm of ‘race-making’ with attention to the role of disease in racialisation, to anatomy and theories of “Blackness”, and to biopower and the politics of medicine as an Enlightenment project. The purview of medicine, slavery, and race-making now covers both its contribution to emerging theories of race, but also its racializing practices, which established enduring patterns of inequality and injustice in the provision of treatment and care.  The aim of this conference is to bring together those working specifically on medicine, and its relationship with race and/or slavery, in the broadest remit of the Atlantic World.

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2 May

Network Event: London’s Records of Slavery

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Next
25 June

Caribbean Connections: Seventeenth-Century Barbados and Britain