Professor Suzanne Schwarz presented a paper and was part of a discussion panel at the Maghrib Conference on Race, Gender and Migration, Fes, Morocco between 15 and 17 December 2019. The conference, held in honour of Catherine Coquery-Vidrovich, Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris-Diderot, was organised by the Center for Maghrib Studies at Arizona State University. It was hosted by Morocco’s International Institute for Languages and Cultures (INLAC), and sponsored by the Centre International de Recherches sur les Esclavages et Post-Esclavages and L’Unité de Recherche Migrations et Société.
Professor Schwarz was part of an international discussion panel on the ARTE film on Les Routes de L’Esclavage (Slavery Routes) with Catherine Coquery-Vidrovich, Klara Boyer-Rossol, Salah Trabelsi (Université Lumière Lyon 2), and Chouki El Hamel (Arizona State University). Slavery Routes is a documentary in four parts, co-directed by Daniel Cattier, Juan Gélas and Fanny Glissant, with historical advisor Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. Suzanne Schwarz was interviewed for this series, which has been screened widely, including on Al Jazeera in 2018. She also presented a paper entitled, ‘Reinterpreting Cultural Encounters: European mariners in Morocco in the Late Eighteenth Century’, which analysed the contemporary accounts of a number of European mariners who experienced captivity in the Maghrib.
In March 2020, Professor Schwarz participated in an international online conference. The two-day conference entitled ‘Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (DATAS)’ was due to be held at the University of Essex, but was moved online. The conference brought together 25 international participants from Canada, North America, Brazil, Costa Rica, France and various other European countries. This was the first in a series of planned conferences for the international research team engaged in the project: ‘Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (DATAS)’, (www.datasproject.org). This research team is led by Paul E. Lovejoy, Distinguished Research Professor and Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora Studies at York University, Toronto. After submitting a successful bid for a collaborative research project to the ‘Trans-Atlantic Platform Social Innovation Call’, the team subsequently received funding from the Trans-Atlantic Platform: Social Sciences and Humanities. The DATAS project ‘develops an innovative method to explore African ethnonyms from the era of trans-Atlantic slavery, circa 1500-1867. Ethnonyms index African identities, places and historical events to reconstruct African culture that is linked to a history of slavery, colonialism and racism. The project centres on the need to understand the origins and trajectories of people of African descent who populated the trans-Atlantic world in the modern era. The development of a method for analysing demographic change and confronting social inequalities arising from racism constitutes a social innovation’. Tracing the availability of relevant archival sources about African men, women and children is central to this project, and Professor Schwarz presented a paper entitled ‘Research on Sierra Leone: British Library Endangered Archives Project, Sierra Leone Public Archives’.
International Studies Research Group 