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    About

    I am a historian of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, with a particular interest in exploring the relationship between Britain and empire. 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 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’.

     

    Education

    University College London, PhD (2017)

    University College London, MA (2012)

    University College London, BA (2011)

    Blog Posts

      Publications

      ‘Negotiating female property- and slave-ownership in the aristocratic world’, Historical Journal, 63:3 (2020), pp. 581-602.


       

      ‘Katherine Mackenzie’, in Elizabeth Ewan, Rose Pipes, Jane Rendall and Sian Reynolds (eds.), The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018)


       

      ‘Forgotten women: gender and absentee slave-ownership’, in Katie Donington, Ryan Hanley and Jessica Moody, (eds.), Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: Local Nuances of a “National Sin” (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016)


       

      ‘Anna Eliza Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, first Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)

      Hannah Young

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      @hlyoung

      Active 5 years, 6 months ago