Dr Emma Christopher

PhD (University College London)
Room 842 Brennan Building

+61 2 9036 6228

Emma Christopher gained her PhD from University College London in 2002 and has also studied at the University of Pennsylvania and taught at the University of Toronto. She has received grants and fellowships from the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society and Harvard University's Atlantic World Center. She has also been a Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library in California, a Caird Fellow at the National Maritime Museum in London and a Paul Cuffe Fellow at Mystic Seaport Museum, Connecticut. She has been a member of Harvard's annual Atlantic World Seminar and attended a UNESCO slave route project in West Africa. She currently holds two ARC fellowships and is researching and writing about the links between the transatlantic slave trade and convict transportation.

• Atlantic history
• Transatlantic slave trade
• Convict transportation

• Her current projects include a book she is just completing about the convicts transported to West African slave trading forts in the 1780s, and a study of Donald Trail, the Second Fleet captain who had been a slave trader and later imported slaves while serving as harbour master at Cape Town.
• Sierra Leone and Australia: a case of the vanishing twin
  Dr. Christopher’s new project is an examination of Sydney and Freetown, Sierra Leone – both founded in 1787-8 in the aftermath of the American Revolution – as twin colonies. It is a project which aims to explore the circumstances in which the two cities have had such different fates and to understand the context of present-day Sierra Leonean immigration into Australia. This ARC-funded project is an inter-disciplinary venture intended to result in both a book and a documentary film. Her co-investigators on the project are Dr. Maree Delofski and Professor Paul Lovejoy.

co-editor (with Marcus Rediker and Cassandra Pybus), Many Middle Passages: Forced Migrations and the Making of the Modern World (University of California Press, 2007)
(The royalties from this book go the US-based charity Free the Slaves).

Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).