Dr Laura Sandy PhD

Personal Statement

Dr Laura Sandy is a Reader in the History of Slavery in the Department of History.
Her research focuses on the history of slavery in North America and the Atlantic World. Laura joined the University of Liverpool in 2015. In 2018, she was appointed as the university's co-director of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery (CSIS) in collaboration with the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool. Laura is also an editor for Liverpool University Press’ series: “Studies in International Slavery.” She teaches undergraduate modules on early American history, American slavery, civil rights, slavery and heritage, and comparative slaveries. Before joining the University of Liverpool, Laura previously held tenured posts at Oxford Brookes University and Keele University. Laura’s PhD award and first Post-Doctoral award were funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and her research has been funded by the Leverhulme, the British Academy, Research England, the Higher Education Innovation Fund, the Higher Education Academy, the British Association of American Studies, the U.S. Embassy, the Mellon and Rockefeller foundations, and a wide variety of universities, libraries, and educational institutes in the United States.

Laura investigates experiences that have been placed on the “margins” of slavery studies and recovers the life stories of those neglected in existing histories. She aims to expand and challenge how we understand the operation of slavery and the impact it had on all those involved. Her first monograph, “Overseers of Early American Slavery: Supervisors, Enslaved Labourers, and the Plantation Enterprise,” reconstructed the lives of 18th century plantation supervisors and artisans, free and enslaved, and also their wives and families. Through this research, she uncovered a much more complex picture of free and enslaved individuals who were entwined in businesses built upon physical coercion and the labour of the unfree.

Continuing to unearth those who remain almost invisible in the historical record, Laura has since worked on projects about slave resistance, voluntary enslavement, the laws governing slavery, the theft of the enslaved, and the experiences of ‘free people of colour’ under slavery. Her work has involved archival research in every former ‘slave state’ in the southern United States and has led to the publication of collections such as "The Civil War and Slavery Reconsidered: Negotiating the Peripheries” and “Women and Slavery.” These projects reconsider the history and memory of slavery, women, violence, and resistance in American history. Her current research, on the illegal trafficking of enslaved people in North America, in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, further illuminates the lives of the many women, men, and children who remain at the "edges" of studies of slavery.

During her career she has given talks on her research to historical societies, public organisations, and schools, and has advised on national and international museum exhibitions. She has collaborated on projects with educators and heritage partners in the UK, Europe, and the United States. Indeed, since joining Liverpool, she has used her experience and networks to support numerous public engagement activities with UK schools, museums, NGOs, activists, policy-makers, and other public organisations regarding issues related to historic and modern slavery and the link between “Capitalism and Slavery.” A career highpoint to date was welcoming Erica Williams, daughter of Dr Eric Williams, Trinidad and Tobago's first Prime Minister and seminal historian of slavery, to Liverpool in 2019, as a keynote speaker at an international conference celebrating her father's legacy and the "Getting Word African American Oral History Project," based at Monticello in Virginia.

Laura hopes that through collective efforts and the crucial inclusion of “untold stories” and marginalised perspectives, together we can start to redress the balance, rethink the historical memory of international slavery, fight global inequality, and find solutions to the problem of contemporary trafficking.

Prizes or Honours

• Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching Higher Education (Higher Education Academy, 2009)

Funded Fellowships