Lecture at VCU to explore the 19th-century’s ‘Slave Master of Trinidad’

Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Ph.D., a professor of Africana studies at Wellesley College and author of “The Slave Master of Trinidad: William Hardin Burnley and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” (2018) will deliver a lecture at Virginia Commonwealth University on April 18.

Cudjoe, an expert on Caribbean literature and Caribbean intellectual history, will speak at 3:30 p.m in the Forum Room of University Student Commons, 907 Floyd Ave. The event is free and open to the public.

Cudjoe’s lecture, “William Hardin Burnley and the Black Atlantic,” will focus on Burnley, the largest slave owner in Trinidad in the 19th century and the biggest resident slave owner in the British Caribbean. He was born in the United States to English parents and settled in Trinidad in 1802, becoming one of the most influential and prominent agents of the British empire.

The lecture will explore Burnley's activities in the Atlantic during that period.

The event is sponsored by the Alexandrian Society of the Department of History in the College of Humanities and Sciences.

For more information, contact William Clark, president of the Alexandrian Society, at clarkwt2@vcu.edu.