Freedom Narratives: Mapping Histories and Tracing Lives

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How do we restore the humanity behind the numbers of the slave trade? What does it mean to write history from the perspective of those born free, rather than those defined by their enslavement? How can digital tools help us trace the movement, resilience, and testimony of African individuals across centuries and continents?

This launch event serves as the official re-launch of Freedom Narratives, a digital humanities project that reframes our understanding of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by centering the biographies of people born in Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries. Moving beyond traditional ‘slave narratives’, the project curates a growing online repository of testimonies, legal records, and biographical data capturing where individuals came from, why they were enslaved, and what became of them. In this new phase of the project, we are demonstrating not only how our large dataset allows us to trace the movement of individuals, but also how to record life narratives, map life trajectories across the Atlantic Ocean, and show personal connections between different groups of people. In many cases, these are stories of people born free who later reclaimed their freedom, or who never experienced enslavement at all. By treating narratives as fundamental units of analysis, Freedom Narratives challenges us to see the past through individual lives, not aggregate suffering.

During this symposium, we invite specialists to discuss various forms of gathering life narratives to show the diversity of experiences and methodologies.

The event is generously supported by the Medicine and the Making of Race project at King’s College London, directed by Hannah Murphy.

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Where: Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King’s College London, Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS

When: Monday 7 September 2026, 9:30AM-6PM

Hosted and organised by Freedom Narratives and Walk With Web.

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This is a hybrid event. Please register by selecting either an in-person or online ticket when reserving your spot. More details regarding speakers and schedule will be announced soon.

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Panels & Presentations

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Panel 1 – Writing Narratives

Mariana Candido (Emory University), “Women, Girls, and the Precarity of Freedom in West Central Africa”

Chloe Ireton (University College London), TBA

Maeve Ryan (King's College London), TBA

Panel 2 – Bodies as Storytelling

Lamin Manneh (Cambridge University), "The Counterfoil: Tin Tickets and the accounting of Liberated African Disposal"

Hannah Murphy (King's College London), TBA

Rawan Mohamed (King's College London), “Consider the Lillies of the Field: Gender, the Enslaved Body, and Recovering Life Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Sudan”

Leidy Alpízar (Universidad de Costa Rica), “Reading Bodies, Reading Lives: Yoruba Women in Church Missionary Society Periodicals, 1840–1880”

Panel 3 – Mapping Lives: Locations and Displacement

Henry Lovejoy (University of Colorado Boulder), “The Uncertain Geography of War, Slavery, and Migration in Nineteenth-Century West Africa, 1800-1865”

Suzanne Schwarz (University of Worcester), "From Fiction to First-Hand Testimony: Assessing the Reliability of Biographical Records of West Africans in the Era of the Slave Trade"

Malina Yallanki (University of Worcester), "Tracing Identities Through Names: Muslim 'Liberated Africans' in Nineteenth-Century Freetown"

Lucrezia Canzutti (King's College London), TBA

Description supplied by the event organiser.