The event brought together international scholars and voices from the African diaspora to explore themes of identity, resistance, and historical memory.

The series served as both an extension of the Black Studies Trinity Elective and an open invitation to the wider academic community to engage with the rich intellectual traditions and contemporary relevance of Black Studies. 

The full programme is below:

Monday 6th October 6 pm: 'Surinamese in the Netherlands: Centering the Black Surinamese Diaspora'

Ashley Melcherts, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Mississippi State University.

Ashley Melcherts is a Black Surinamese Dutch woman, athlete, sociologist, and currently a PhD Candidate at Mississippi State University. Ashley is mostly concerned with how social inequalities at the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender influence people’s sense of self to better understand how they navigate and resist systems of oppression. In her current dissertation research, she puts identity formation in the larger context of processes such as racism and colorism, by centering the lived experiences of Black Surinamese Dutch people.

Tuesday 7th October 6.30 pm: 'Tracing Black Women’s Experiences under Italian Fascism'

Mathilde Lyons, PhD student in Italian and History, University of St Andrews.

Mathilde Lyons is a PhD student in Italian and History at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the experiences of Black people, mainly from Italy’s East African colonies, who lived in Italy during the Fascist period (1922-1945). Her doctoral research has led to the compilation of a corpus of approximately 6000 Black individuals who spent time in Italy during this period, the vast majority of whom were men. Within this overwhelmingly male archive, women’s stories appear more fleetingly, yet they offer insights into how race and gender intersected in Fascist Italy. By centring women’s experiences, this paper highlights forms of everyday life practices and acts of resistance that often differed from men’s experiences and which illuminate how Black life was lived and felt beyond individual’s interaction with the state.

Wednesday 8th October 6.30 pm: 'An Exploration of "Afropean" Identity Through Black and Multiracial Contemporary Visual Artists'

H eather Nickels, Doctoral Candidate in Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University in the City of New York.

H eather Nickels is an independent curator, researcher, writer and doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Nickels received her BA from Barnard College of Columbia University in the City of New York in 2016, her MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2019, and her MA and MPhil from Columbia University in 2023 and 2025 respectively. Her central interests include: African American art and artists living and working in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries; Black women artists' global histories; Afro-European/Afropean Studies; and early modern representations of race in the Americas and Europe. She has worked as a full-time curator on exhibitions on modern photography, painting, prints and sculpture from the Americas; reinstalled several iterations of African/Diaspora collections galleries; commissioned murals from contemporary artists from the American South; and proposed and acquired more than two dozen art pieces for museums.

Thursday 9th October 6.30 pm: 'Maroons, Marronage, and Black Liberation in Brazil and the Américas'

marina dadico, PhD Candidate in Latin American & Latine Studies & AAUW International Fellow, University of California, Santa Cruz.

marina [ela/ella/she] is a cuir scholar interested in Black geographies, urban anthropology, território, marronage, and land struggles across the Américas. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre (Brazil), and is now pursuing a PhD in Latin American & Latine Studies, with a designated emphasis in Anthropology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current research approaches quilombola women mobilizing their communities toward territorial rights in Porto Alegre, Brazil’s southernmost metropolis. They do this not only by navigating land tenure law and state violence in a highly white-coded city, but also by creating spaces to practice freedom. marina’s work has been supported by various funding agencies, including the Conference on Latin American History’s Scobie Award, the Brazilian Studies Association’s Brazil Initiation Scholarship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and the American Association of University Women’s International Doctoral Fellowship.