This year’s Black History Month Lecture, ‘Ann Pratt, Mary Seacole, and Questioning British History’, will be delivered by Dr Christienna Fryar, writer and independent historian of Britain and the Caribbean. This lecture tells the story of two mixed-race Jamaican women, one of whom is widely considered an important figure within Black British history while the other is barely known, and questions the fraught relationship between British history and Black British history.

Formerly an academic, Christienna Fryar was the founding convenor of the MA Black British History at Goldsmiths, University of London, the first taught masters’ programme of its kind in the UK. Before this, she taught Caribbean history, comparative slavery and emancipation, and disaster studies at the University of Liverpool, where she was the director of the MA International Slavery. She has also worked at universities in North Carolina and Western New York. In addition to freelance radio broadcasting, she is currently writing Entangled Lands: A Caribbean History of Britain, which will be published with Penguin/Allen Lane.

This lecture has been jointly organised by the BME staff network and the Equality and Diversity Unit and is generously sponsored by the Mathematical institute.