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Associate Professor Emma Christopher

Associate Professor Emma Christopher

Associate Professor

Ph.D.,2002, University College London, 'The Sons of Neptune and the Sons of Ham: a history of slave shipsailors and their captive cargoes.'

Arts, Design & Architecture (ADA)
School of Humanities & Languages

Emma Christopher’s latest book is called Freedom in White and Blackand is the story of the only two men shipped to Australia as convicts for the crime of slave trading, and the enslaved men, women and children rescued from them. She previously published Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and A Merciless Place (New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010), which won both the Kay Daniels and Ernest Scott prizes. She is the co-editor, with Marcus Rediker and Cassandra Pybus, of Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

Emma is also a documentary filmmaker and is the director, producer and researcher of They Are We, (New York: Icarus Film, 2014) which won five Best Documentary Awards, featured widely in the media, and was chosen as the United Nations’ Remembrance of Slavery film 2015. It has screened in more than 70 countries around the world. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon described the film and Emma’s work as, ‘an inspiration; a victory over slavery’.

She is an anti-slavery campaigner and previously worked at Anti-Slavery Australia at UTS. She has held both fourand five year ARC fellowships as well as two other Discovery Grants. She is currently an Australian Human Rights Institute Associate.

Phone
9385 3768
Location
323 Morven Brown
  • Books | 2018
    Christopher E, 2018, Freedom in White and Black: a lost story of the illegal slave trade and its global legacy, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin,
    Books | 2011
    Christopher E, 2011, A Merciless Place The Fate of Britain's Convicts after the American Revolution, Oxford University Press
    Books | 2011
    Christopher E, 2011, A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa, OUP Oxford
    Books | 2010
    Christopher E, 2010, A Merciless Place The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa and How It Led to the Settlement of Australia, Allen & Unwin
    Books | 2007
    Christopher E; Pybus C; Rediker M, 2007, Many Middle Passages Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, Univ of California Press
    Books | 2007
    Christopher E; Pybus C; Rediker M, 2007, Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World
    Books | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807, CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS,
    Books | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807, Cambridge University Press
  • Book Chapters | 2016
    Christopher E, 2016, '‘’Tis enough that we give them liberty’?: Liberated Africans at Sierra Leone in the early era of slave trade suppression’', in Huzzey R; Burroughs R (ed.), The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade British Policies, Practices and Representations of Naval Coercion
    Book Chapters | 2015
    Christopher E; Maxwell Stewart H, 2015, 'Alternatives to Botany Bay', in Bashford A; MacIntyre S (ed.), The Cambridge History of Australia: Volume 1, Indigenous and Colonial Australia, Cambridge University Press
    Book Chapters | 2013
    Christopher E, 2013, 'From Ireland to Africa: the Criminal Career and Punishment of Patrick Madan’', in Fortin J; Meuwese M (ed.), Atlantic Biographies Individuals and Peoples in the Atlantic World, BRILL
    Book Chapters | 2012
    Thompson SM, 2012, 'Introduction', in Thompson S; Maginn P (ed.), Planning Australia: An Overview of Urban and Regional Planning, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, pp. 1 - 13
    Book Chapters | 2011
    Christopher E; Maxwell-Stewart H, 2011, 'Convict transportation in global context, c. 1700–88', in The Cambridge History of Australia, pp. 68 - 90,
    Book Chapters | 2007
    Christopher E; Pybus C; Rediker M, 2007, 'Introduction: Many Middle Passages', in Many Middle Passages Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, Univ of California Press
    Book Chapters | 2007
    Christopher E, 2007, '“’The slave trade is merciful compared to [this]’: Slave Traders, Convict Transportation and the Abolitionists”', in Christopher E; Pybus C; Rediker M (ed.), Many Middle Passages Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, Univ of California Press
    Book Chapters | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, 'Life in the White Man's Grave', in SLAVE SHIP SAILORS AND THEIR CAPTIVE CARGOES, 1730-1807, CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, pp. 125 - 162,
    Book Chapters | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, 'Lives for Sale', in SLAVE SHIP SAILORS AND THEIR CAPTIVE CARGOES, 1730-1807, CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, pp. 195 - 225,
    Book Chapters | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, 'Sea Changes', in SLAVE SHIP SAILORS AND THEIR CAPTIVE CARGOES, 1730-1807, CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, pp. 163 - 194,
    Book Chapters | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, 'Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 Conclusion', in SLAVE SHIP SAILORS AND THEIR CAPTIVE CARGOES, 1730-1807, CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, pp. 226 - 229,
    Book Chapters | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, 'Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 Introduction', in SLAVE SHIP SAILORS AND THEIR CAPTIVE CARGOES, 1730-1807, CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, pp. 1 - 20,
    Book Chapters | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, 'Slaving Merchants and Merchant Seamen', in SLAVE SHIP SAILORS AND THEIR CAPTIVE CARGOES, 1730-1807, CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, pp. 23 - 50,
    Book Chapters | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, 'The Bloody Rise of Western Freedom', in SLAVE SHIP SAILORS AND THEIR CAPTIVE CARGOES, 1730-1807, CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, pp. 91 - 121,
    Book Chapters | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, 'The Multiracial Crews of Slave Ships', in SLAVE SHIP SAILORS AND THEIR CAPTIVE CARGOES, 1730-1807, CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, pp. 51 - 90,
    Book Chapters | 2006
    Christopher E, 2006, '‘Steal a Handkerchief, See the World: the trans-oceanic voyaging of Thomas Limpus’', in Lake M; Curthoys A (ed.), Connected Worlds History in Transnational Perspective, ANU E Press
  • Journal articles | 2024
    Wiegmink P; Miller I; Lueb O; Christopher E, 2024, 'German (post)colonialism: Archiving, collecting, exhibiting and repatriating Pacific cultures, a conversation', Atlantic Studies : Global Currents,
    Journal articles | 2023
    Christopher E, 2023, 'African Sailors in the Atlantic World', Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History
    Journal articles | 2022
    Christopher E, 2022, 'Mary Wills. Envoys of Abolition: British Naval Officers and the Campaign against the Slave Trade in West Africa. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. 241. Cloth £80.00', American Historical Review, 127, pp. 1959 - 1960,
    Journal articles | 2022
    Christopher E, 2022, '‘I am not a Kanaka or a N____’: slave pasts and kidnapped men in the Pacific', Australian Journal of Biography and History, 6,
    Journal articles | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, 'Black Lives Still Don’t Matter Here', Histories of the Present, History Workshop Journal companion piece,
    Journal articles | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, 'Far More than Money: British West Indian Slavery, Emancipation, and Australia’s Sugar Industry', Australian Historical Studies
    Journal articles | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, 'From the Caribbean to Queensland: re-examining Australia’s ‘blackbirding’ past and its roots in the global slave trade', The Conversation
    Journal articles | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, 'Niklas Frykman, The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution', New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (NWIG)
    Journal articles | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, 'Review of Mary Wills, Envoys of Abolition: British Naval Officers and the Campaign Against the Slave Trade in West Africa', American Historical Review
    Journal articles | 2020
    Christopher E, 2020, 'An Illegitimate Offspring: South Sea Islanders, Queensland Sugar, and the Heirs of the British Atlantic Slave Complex', History Workshop Journal,
    Journal articles | 2019
    Christopher E, 2019, 'The saviour and the revolutionary: Afro-caribbean responses in a Queensland/new Guinea kidnapping case', Slavery and Abolition, 40, pp. 321 - 340,
    Journal articles | 2016
    Christopher E, 2016, 'Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling', JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORY, 57, pp. 468 - 469,
    Journal articles | 2016
    Christopher E, 2016, 'Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail', LABOR-STUDIES IN WORKING-CLASS HISTORY OF THE AMERICAS, 13, pp. 154 - 156,
    Journal articles | 2015
    Buchanan T, 2015, 'Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail', Journal of Social History, pp. shv013 - shv013,
    Journal articles | 2014
    Christopher E, 2014, 'Behind the Boko Haram headlines, slavery in Africa is the real crisis', The Conversation,
    Journal articles | 2013
    Christopher , 2013, 'Josefa Diago and the Origins of Cuba’s Gangá Traditions', Transition, pp. 133 - 133,
    Journal articles | 2013
    Christopher E, 2013, 'How Cuban Villagers Learned They Descended from Sierra Leone Slaves', The Atlantic Magazine,
    Journal articles | 2011
    Christopher E, 2011, 'The murderer and his victim: Tracing a lost convict of the Botany Bay decision', Life Writing, 8, pp. 35 - 49,
    Journal articles | 2010
    Christopher E, 2010, 'After the bicentenary: The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in recent history', History Today, 60
    Journal articles | 2010
    Christopher E, 2010, 'Looking forward from the deck', ATLANTIC STUDIES-GLOBAL CURRENTS, 7, pp. 23 - 26,
    Journal articles | 2010
    Moore D, 2010, 'Colloquy with Marcus Rediker on The Slave Ship: A Human History', ATLANTIC STUDIES-GLOBAL CURRENTS, 7, pp. 5 - 6,
    Journal articles | 2009
    Christopher E, 2009, 'From the 'Ballad-Singing Monkey' to the 'Cunning Savages': The voyage to found a British Colony on the Orange River, 1785-1786'', South African Historical Journal, 61, pp. 750 - 765,
    Journal articles | 2009
    Christopher E, 2009, 'The Memoirs of Captain Hugh Crow: The Life and Times of a Slave Trade Captain', INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW, 31, pp. 124 - 126,
    Journal articles | 2009
    Christopher E, 2009, 'Women and Slavery. Volume 1: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval Atlantic', CANADIAN JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES, 43, pp. 583 - 587,
    Journal articles | 2009
    Christopher E, 2009, 'Women and Slavery. Volume 2: The Modern Atlantic', CANADIAN JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES, 43, pp. 583 - 587,
    Journal articles | 2009
    Christopher E, 2009, '‘From the Ballad Singing Monkey to the Cunning Savages: The Voyage to Found a Penal Colony at the Mouth of the Orange River’', South African Historical Journal
    Journal articles | 2008
    Christopher E, 2008, 'A “Disgrace to the very Colour”: Perceptions of Blackness and Whiteness in the founding of Sierra Leone and Botany Bay', Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 9,
    Journal articles | 2007
    Christopher E, 2007, 'If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade', INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MARITIME HISTORY, 19, pp. 411 - 412,
    Journal articles | 2007
    Christopher E, 2007, 'Reviews of Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors And Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 With a Response by Emma Christopher', INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MARITIME HISTORY, 19, pp. 287 - 299,
    Journal articles | 2007
    Christopher E, 2007, 'Slave Ship Sailors: A Roundtable Response', INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MARITIME HISTORY, 19, pp. 333 - 341,
    Journal articles | 2004
    Christopher E, 2004, 'Another head of the hydra?', Atlantic Studies, 1, pp. 145 - 157,
    Journal articles | 2004
    Christopher E, 2004, '“’Ten Thousand Times Worse than the Convicts’: Rebellious Sailors, Convict Transportation and the Struggle for Freedom”', Journal of Australian Colonial History, 5,
    Journal articles | 2001
    Christopher E, 2001, 'Black Hands in a Black Trade', Times Higher Education Supplement
  • Other | 2024
    Christopher E, 2024, The First Sugar, The Library Council of NSW,
    Recorded / Rendered Creative Works | 2022
    Christopher E, 2022, "Desde mi cocina para el mundo", Editor(s): Christopher E, Screen capture, Published: 05 October 2022, Duration: 08:36:00, Recorded / Rendered Creative Works
    Conference Presentations | 2022
    Christopher E, 2022, 'Reinventing the “necessary" Blackness of sugar workers: Atlantic Racialisation’s Pacific Legacies', presented at Colonising Companies, Commodities, and Labour in the Western Pacific, Department of Modern History and Society, NTNU Dragvoll, 13 June 2022 - 14 June 2022,
    Conference Presentations | 2022
    Christopher E, 2022, 'ʻKidnapping Cannibalsʼ: The Scandal Over Recruitment and the British/German Division of New Guinea', presented at Slavery and Dependency: New Perspectives on Heritage and German Global History, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), University of Bonn, 06 July 2022 - 08 July 2022,
    Conference Papers | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, 'A Divided Diaspora: from Gallinas to Cuba and Puerto Rico', RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES INSTITUTE FOR AFRICAN STUDIES, presented at 15th International African Studies Conference “Destinies of Africa in the Modern World”, RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES INSTITUTE FOR AFRICAN STUDIES, 24 May 2021
    Conference Papers | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, 'Emma Christopher - Importing and Exploiting People from Three Continents: A Story of Three Generations of one British Family', ACU Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, presented at Trans-colonial connections: mobility and transculturation in the British colonial south, 1770-1890, ACU Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, 22 June 2021
    Conference Papers | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, '‘I am not a Kanaka or a N____’: slave pasts and kidnapped men in the Pacific'', in Lydon J (ed.), UWA, presented at Writing Slavery into Australian History, UWA, 25 February 2021,
    Conference Papers | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, '“To Reinvigorate our Culture”: secret society ‘survivals’ in the diaspora and at ‘home’', Uppsala University, presented at #MANSAUppsala2021: Beyond Crisis and Insecurity in West Africa International West Africa Conference, Uppsala University, 16 June 2021,
    Recorded / Rendered Creative Works | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, All of We, Published: 03 October 2021, Duration: 51 minutes, Recorded / Rendered Creative Works
    Recorded / Rendered Creative Works | 2021
    Christopher E, 2021, We the Cimarrons [Feature Documentary], Published: 26 September 2021, Duration: 0:55:21, Recorded / Rendered Creative Works,
    Recorded / Rendered Creative Works | 2020
    Christopher E, 2020, My Grandfather's Notebooks, Published: 2020, Duration: 00.05.00, Recorded / Rendered Creative Works,
    Recorded / Rendered Creative Works | 2020
    Christopher E, 2020, Our Village Djinn Doesn’t Like White People, Published: 2020, Duration: 0.06.00, Recorded / Rendered Creative Works
    Conference Presentations | 2018
    Christopher E, 2018, '"The Coast Swarms with Slave Ships": Slaving Trading and Captives after Abolition', presented at American Historical Association Annual Conference, Washington DC, 04 January 2018 - 07 January 2018,
    Conference Presentations | 2018
    Christopher E, 2018, 'The Trope of the Ruined Planter and Australia’s Sugar Pioneers', presented at Ending Slavery in the Caribbean and Beginning Settler Colonialism in Australasia, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, 14 December 2018
    Conference Presentations | 2018
    Christopher E, 2018, 'When Legacies of 'old' slavery and Methods of resisting 'new' slavery overlap: The Banta of Sierra Leone', presented at Between Slavery and Post-Slavery: Citizenship, Dependence and Abolitionism in African and Indian Ocean Societies, University of Mauritius, 10 April 2018 - 12 April 2018,
    Conference Papers | 2016
    Christopher E, 2016, ''Azotando a un caballo muerto': El debate sobre Herskovits, la trata de esclavos ilegal, y el origen de los Gangá‐Longobá en Cuba” / “Unintentionally Beating a Dead Horse: The Herskovits Debate, the Illegal Slave Trade, and the Origins of Cuba’s Gangá‐Longobá”', Havana, Cuba, presented at EL COMERCIO DE ESCLAVOS A CUBA: NUEVAS PERSPECTIVAS DE INVESTIGACIÓN THE SLAVE TRADE TO CUBA: NEW RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES, Havana, Cuba, 09 June 2016 - 11 June 2016,
    Other | 2014
    Christopher E, 2014, They Are We [Feature Documentary],
  • Media | 2020
    Christopher E; Curthoys A; Lester A; Lydon J; Vanderbyl N, 2020, No slavery in Australia? The dark legacies of slave ownership persist long after abolition, ABC, ,
    Media | 2019
    Christopher E, 2019, The first sugar, The Library Council of NSW,
    Media | 2019
    Christopher E, 2019, “The Amistad Mutineers’ Countrymen: a Rebellious Caribbean Diaspora”, Africana Studies Program Amistad Research Center Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute History Department, New Orleans, Louisiana, ,

  • Scientia Fellow, UNSW, 2018-2021
  • Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, 2017-19
  • Australian Research Council 5-year Fellowship, 2010-2014
  • Gilder Lehrman Research Fellowship, Yale University, 2010
  • Sawyer Mellon Foundation Grant (joint application)
  • Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, 2008-2010
  • Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2006-2009
  • Caird Fellow, National Maritime Museum, London, 2004
  • Atlantic World Research Fellowship, Harvard University, 2004
  • Mellon Fellow, Huntington Library, California, 2003
  • Paul Cuffe Memorial Scholarship, Mystic Seaport Museum, Connecticut, 2001-2
  • University of Pennsylvania visiting research position, 2001-2
  • Arts and Humanities Research Board Award, British Academy, 2000

They Are We:

  • Best Documentary: Sierra Leone National Entertainment Awards, 2017
  • Best Documentary, Miami Documentary Festival, 2014
  • Best Educational Documentary, Bare Bones Film and Music Festival, 2014
  • Best Documentary, Bronze Lens Atlanta, 2014
  • Audience Choice Award, London Latin American Film Festival, 2014
  • Best Foreign Feature Film, nomination, San Diego Black Film Festival, 2014
  • Best Chronicle, nomination, Maverick Movie Awards, 2014

A Merciless Place:

  • Kay Daniels Prize, 2011
  • Ernest Scott Prize, 2011
  • New South Wales Premier’s Prize, shortlisted, 2011
  • Queensland Premier’s Prize, shortlisted, 2011


Humanitarian Award for Anti-Slavery Research in West Africa, University of Minnesota, 2010.

I am currently involvedin two projects.

The first is an extension of the work that resulted in They Are We, exploring the links to a slave revolt in Puerto Rico in 1843 and seeking to further understand why and how the ancestor of the Afro-Cuban Longobá kept alive her herbal medicinal training. The project seeks to understand more about the ways thatmale and female slaves from a tiny, specific region of West Africaresisted in the Spanish Americas. It also explores the ways in which the anti-slavery techniques of old, such as initiation into men's and women's societies, are still used today in the same chiefdoms to try and protect the young from trafficking.

I am also involved in researching the personal and familial links between transatlantic slavery and the Pacific Island labour trade. Theseinclude compensation money from the abolition of Caribbean slavery that was used by sons and grandsons to establish Queensland sugar plantations, and the role of sailors of African origin on Pacific Labour ships.

My Teaching

INST 1006