Olivette Otele

Professor Olivette Otele is a Professor of History of Slavery and Memory at the University of Bristol. She holds a PhD from Universite Paris IV-La Sorbonne, on the subject of European colonial and post-colonial History, and is a Fellow and a Vice President of the Royal Historical Society.

Olivette’s current research centres around transnational history and in particular the link between history, collective memory and geopolitics in relation to British and French colonial pasts. She charts and analyses the ways in which Britain and France have been addressing questions of citizenship, race and identity through the politics of remembrance. She also enquires into the value of public gestures, the meaning of public history and the impact of cultural memory.

Olivette has written extensively on the history and memory of enslavement in port cities and on memory and memorialisation in the Atlantic World as well as on the histories of people of Africa descent. Her forthcoming publication is African Europeans: An Untold History (Hurst, 2020).

Professor Otele has been the recipient of several national and international prestigious research grants. A broadcaster (BBC radio and TV), she also is a regular contributor to the press.

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