Research

Scholarship & Research

 

 

Historian & Scholar

I’m a scholar of West African history, the transAtlantic slave trade, African American history, and the histories of comparative slavery, emancipation, and abolition in the Atlantic World. My specialization is the compensated abolition of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the histories of the British Empire and the connections between the United States, the Sierra Leone colony, and West Africa. 


 

Select Publications

“Whose Loss?”: Reparations, Indemnities, and Sovereignty During the Era of Slave Trade

My dissertation provides a comparative analysis of the disparities in indemnities – monetary compensation, territorial concessions and land redistribution, recognition of sovereignty, and legal protection – that were distributed by Britain to European powers, American nations, and West African sovereigns for slave trade abolition compliance, sanctioned through bilateral slave traffic suppression treaties, and based on the identity of contracting partners from 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade, to the ratification of the final Anglo-West African anti-slave trade treaties in1863.

 

  • For Such a Time as This: The Nowness of Reparations for Black People in New Jersey Report (New Jersey Reparations Council, June 2025)

  • Segregation in Evanston: An Impact Study (The African American Redress Network of Howard University’s Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, and Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, 2021)