We are delighted to share the programme for this year's Summer Scholars! This annual season of lunchtime talks explores the exciting and wide-ranging research into the British Library’s Americas collections by Eccles Institute Fellows and associates, as well as Library staff.  

Talks are free of charge and take place in the Library's Knowledge Centre from 12.30 - 13.30 on select days throughout the summer; no need to book, just drop in!

Look forward to seeing you there, the programme is below:

Thursday 3 July  

Golden Harvest: ‘Home’ in the Imagination of the Immigrant: Zeus Sumra reflects on the ways in which the work of Trinidad-born textile designer Althea McNish inspired his novella. 

A Reading of the Story Groom of the Stool, Set in Trinidad: Nicole-Rachelle Moore reads a story inspired by a recollection of her paternal grandmother and embedded in Trinidad and Tobago's history. 

Thursday 10 July 

A Place Called Home: Community Curriculum in Rural Jamaica:Shereca McGowan-Hunter explores the concept of community curriculum within a remote rural community in St. Andrew, Jamaica.  

Public and Digital Diplomacy in Regional Organisations: The Case of CARICOM: Andel Andrew reflects on the evolving landscape of public and digital diplomacy, particularly within the context of regional organisations like The Caribbean Community (CARICOM). 

Thursday 17 July 

Writing Speculative Historical Fiction: Wild Women of the Northwest: Inés G. Labarta discusses the creative process behind her latest novel-in-progress, an alternative version of Spain's colonial past set in an island-continent in the North Atlantic. 

Speculating and Reimagining Slavery: A Creative Exploration of the Long Papers: Cherelle Findley explores how creative writers can use speculative fiction to reflect on the legacies of transatlantic enslavement.  

Tuesday 29 July 

Deerskins, Trade and Cotton, 1760s - 1830s:Artist Melinda Schwakhofer shares her journey of discovery and re-connection to her Indigenous Muscogee Nation and its history and culture through her textile art practice, including quilting, stitching and tanning deerskin. 

Yuma: Portraits from a Cuban Journey: Photographer James Clifford Kent reflects on two decades of photographing the people and places of Cuba - how trust is built, stories unfold, and images take on meaning beyond the frame. 

Tuesday 5 August 

‘Another wedding ain’t gon’ happen here’: Resisting Marriage Tourism at Plantations: Laura Wilson explores contemporary Black authored texts that write back against slavery and the plantation from a present-day setting. 

Sound Recordings from the Americas: Michele Banal presents a selection of Americas-originating recordings drawn from the British Library’s Sound Archive and shares the stories and contexts behind them.  

Thursday 14 August 

The Atheist Pamphlet and the American Public Sphere: Florian Zappe discusses the circulation and impact of atheist pamphlet literature within the American public sphere and how such texts engage with and challenge dominant cultural norms. 

Postal Pride: A History of the Gay and Lesbian History on Stamps Club, 1982-2012: Richard Scott Morel explores how the Gay and Lesbian History on Stamps Club enabled people to create knowledge, meaning, identity, community and worldviews, during a pivotal period for LGBTQ+ rights in the USA.  

Tuesday 19 August 

The U.S. Supreme Court and the Working of American Democracy: The U.S. Supreme Court has often become the focus of debates about the present and future of democracy; Emma Long considers whether history is currently repeating itself. 

‘Liberty in North America Triumphant’: A Triumphal Arch in Yorkshire: Alex Lock explores why, shortly after the American Revolution, a Whig politician erected an arch in Yorkshire dedicated to ‘Liberty in North America’, and its impact on Anglo-American relations? 

Thursday 21 August 

Mapping Women: Pragya Agarwal reflects on the challenges of looking for unnamed and hidden women mapmakers in the archives and the way she learnt to listen to the silences for her latest book. 

Development, Planning and Knowledge in Venezuela’s Guayana Project: Gianfranco Selgas explores how planners rendered Guayana both a material and symbolic object of knowledge through infrastructure, maps, reports and images. 

Tuesday 26 August  

Manumission and Morality in Eighteenth-century Barbados: Looking at sentiments expressed around manumission by some of Barbados’s richest planters, Philip Abraham considers how we might historicise moral thinking about slavery, and what this means for discussions of slavery's legacies today. 

The British Library’s Collection of US Underground Comix and Related Ephemera: Reed Puc, a British Library PhD Placement Student, reflects on their investigation into the Library’s rich collection of US underground comix and related ephemera, including collection items of note. 

Thurs 28 August 

‘Jiggs Bennett' and the Reporter Protagonist in Mid 20th-century Black Periodicals: Amber Kirwan discusses the 'reporter protagonist' in the short stories of James H Hill, a prolific feature writer for the Baltimore Afro-American. 

'Boiling Frogs': Using Sound and Performance in Climate Change Research: Reflecting on climate change and the apologue of the boiling frog, Sebas Hau turns to decolonised listening practices and Americas-originating sound and music collections in the British Library.  

For more information about the Eccles Institute and our collections, contact [email protected].

Pamphlets supporting Lélia Gonzalez and other Worker's Party candidates, Brazilian elections, 1982.

The British Library is well known as a scholarly research library holding millions of printed books, archives and manuscripts. Less known are the vast resources in a wide array of formats and from all over the world, available to artists and creatives looking to find new sources of inspiration for their practice, and new spaces to think and research in.

The Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania is therefore excited to announce two new fellowship opportunities for UK-based creative practitioners to immerse themselves in the British Library’s Americas collections.

The first fellowship offers a chance for a UK-based creative with an interest in research-based practice (such as a print- or zine-maker, graphic designer, illustrator or writer) to explore the British Library’s collections of popular print and political ideas from the Americas (including pamphlets, broadsides, comics, zines and ephemera), and to work with one of London’s leading print studios to create a new body of work. If you’re someone interested in an aspect of the Americas’ ideological histories, currents and futures, and fascinated by how materials and design, images and text can work together to carry political meaning, this might be the fellowship for you. For more information on this fellowship, key dates and how to apply, please refer to the Popular Print Fellowship Brief. 

The second fellowship is an opportunity for a UK-based lens-based artist (such as a photographer, filmmaker or content-creator) to explore the British Library’s collections of photographic material of and from Latin-America and the Caribbean (including travelogues, photo books, exhibition catalogues, magazines, newspapers and other photo-related media). If you are interested in interrogating how these regions, their peoples and diasporas have been represented and collected, this fellowship offers a great opportunity to incorporate these critical reflections into a new body of work. In addition to enhanced curatorial support to explore the collections, the fellow will be mentored by leading photographer and scholar of Caribbean and Latin American visual culture, James Clifford Kent. For more information on this fellowship, key dates and how to apply, please refer to the Photography Fellowship Brief. 

A selection of books and magazines with photographic content in the British Library collections.

The deadline for applications for both fellowships is the 2 June 2025 at 10:00 and the fellowships will start in September 2025.

After a year’s hiatus, we are delighted to announce the 2025-26 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellows, all with brilliant new research and creative projects!

Alexander Peacock (Queen's University) - Empire and ecology, wild animals and the British colonization of North America.

Daniela Lucena (Universidad de Buenos Aires – CONICET) - Argentinian artists Delia Cancela and Pablo Mesejean in 1970s London.

Leonardo Santamaria Montero (Cornell University) - Images of the Miskito Kingdom in British and American books and maps in the 19th century.

Daniel Abdalla (University of Liverpool) - environment and indigeneity on stage in early 20th century drama.

Zeus Sumra (creative writer) - writing a novella loosely inspired by the works of Trinidad-born artist Althea McNish.

Julia Guarneri (University of Cambridge) - history of cleaning and cleanliness in the 20th century American home

Kimberly Bain (University of British Colombia) - colonial geological imaginaries and colonial interventions in the Caribbean.

Flor Isabel Palomino Arana (independent art historian) - Santiago Pirate Killer: Iconographic Changes and Importance of Santiago and the Triumphant Militant Church in Colonial Andean and Asian Art.

Thiago Krause (Wayne State University) - a history of slavery and early capitalism from the perspective of the Global South.

Matthew Butler (University of Texas at Austin) – Graham Greene’s 1938 Mexican journey.

Hadas Zahavi (Columbia University) - Kodak’s role in shaping peace and war imagery in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Gianfranco Selgas (University College London) - a cultural and environmental history of Venezuela's extractive zones from 1890 to 1980.

Yvonne Weekes (creative writer) - The Montserrat Jumbie Dance: Reclaiming a Lost Heritage.

Alex Keith (Northwestern University) - Black Women's Theatre Organisations and political activism in the Anglophone African diaspora.

Samuel Niu (Columbia University) - Chinese labour on post-emancipation plantations in the United States and British Caribbean.

Jacob Feltham Forbes (University of Oxford) - transnational Black radical tradition and Anglophone Caribbean publishing and print in Britain.

Peter Walker (University of Wyoming) - Anglican loyalists and the American revolution.

Kirsten Brohm (Aarhus University) - feminist discourse in literary and political magazines and periodicals edited/ published by Anglo-Caribbean women in the late colonial period.

Emily Taylor (Presbyterian College) - Anglophone Caribbean writers and the Casa de las Américas in Cuba.

Florian Zappe (Ludwig Maximilian University) - atheist pamphlet literature in the United States from the mid-19th century until the present.

Melinda Schwakhofer (artist) - deerskin and cotton trade between the Muscogee Nation and Great Britain from the 1760s to the1830s.

Emma Long (University of East Anglia) - Politics, Democracy, and the US Supreme Court.

Lorna French (University of Birmingham) - Black musical revue on the early 20th century London stage.

Malinda Haslett (University of Southern Maine) - Rediscovering the Life and Music of Gilda Ruta: Italian Composer and The Embodiment of the American Dream.

Bryce Evans (Liverpool Hope University) - Impact of US environmental policies on food in Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam circa 1910-1940.

Some of the books written by former Eccles Fellows.