Research interests
My research explores gender and absentee slave-ownership in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. My work examines what it meant — materially, legally, symbolically — for men, and particularly women, to own property, both metropolitan and colonial, landed and in the form of other human beings. In doing so, it serves to complicate ideas about what it meant to be a slave-owner, ‘West Indian’ and absentee.
I am currently working on developing a monograph from my PhD thesis. The book will explore how gender shaped the experiences of both slave-owning women and men. But it will place a particular focus on female absentees and the role they played in helping to transmit wealth rooted in enslavement into metropolitan society. In highlighting how both men and women worked to bringing slave-ownership home to Britain, the book will demonstrate that the histories of Britain and the Caribbean cannot be conceived of separately; they were inextricably intertwined.
I also have an interest in heritage and public history, particularly the ways that histories of empire and enslavement have – and haven’t – been remembered and represented in twenty-first-century Britain. I was historical advisor for the BAFTA-award winning BBC2 documentary Britain’s Forgotten Slave-owners (2015) and have worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I undertook research exploring the relationship between British slave-ownership, collecting and the development of the Museum and, more broadly, encouraged them to confront the ‘difficult’ histories and practices built into the museum. A particular highlight was working with the poet and artist Victoria Adukwei Bulley, who responded to my research to create a series of five films entitled ‘A Series of Unfortunate Inheritances’.
Dr Hannah YoungAvenue Campus
University of Southampton
SO17 1BF
Email: H.L.Young@soton.ac.ukRoom Number: 65/2053
