Booking is available to attend two keynote lectures taking place as part of MMoR’s ‘Caribbean Connections: Seventeenth-Century Britain and Barbados’ workshop. Wednesday’s keynote ‘The Women of Rendezvous’ is being given by Dr. Jenny Shaw.

The lecture will take place in the Nash Lecture Theatre, King’s building, Strand Campus between 17:00 - 18:30, and will be followed by a drinks reception in the New Committee Room on the ground floor of the King’s building.

See the Tickettailor page here to book your free ticket. You can also book a ticket for Thursday’s keynote with Susan Amussen through this same link.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Jenny Shaw is associate professor of History at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Constructions of Difference (2013). Her second book, The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery (2024) is a dramatic transatlantic story about five women who birthed children by the same prominent Barbados politician and enslaver. Two of the women were his wives, two he enslaved, and one was a servant in his household. All were determined to make their way in a world that vastly and differentially circumscribed their life choices. From a Barbados plantation to the center of England’s empire in London, Hester Tomkyns, Frances Knights, Susannah Mingo, Elizabeth Ashcroft, and Dorothy Spendlove built remarkable lives for themselves and their children in spite of, not because of, the man who linked them together. Dr. Shaw has just begun work on her next project tentatively titled, The Duchess and the Dandy: Gender, Race, and Spectacle in Britain’s Eighteenth-Century Empire.