Professor Suzanne Schwarz

Professor of History

Institute of Humanities & Creative Arts

Contact Details

email: s.schwarz@worc.ac.uk

tel: 01905 855481

Teaching & Research

Suzanne Schwarz’s research interests focus on the transatlantic slave trade and abolition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Her current research on Sierra Leone examines the development of the colony, and the ways in which abolitionists attempted to undermine the slave trade and reform African economy and society through policies of ‘Commerce, Civilization and Christianity’. She is currently involved in a British Library Endangered Archives project to preserve rare documentary sources in the Public Archives of Sierra Leone, and is one of the organizers of an international conference on Sierra Leone to be held in Freetown in 2012. Professor Schwarz has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her work on Sierra Leone. She was appointed as an external consultant for the development of the International Slavery Museum in 2007, and has worked closely with National Museums Liverpool to develop continuing professional development courses on the slave trade for teachers. A play based on her book Slave Captain. The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade was performed at National Museums Liverpool in July 2010. Her teaching interests also include local and regional history.

Professional Bodies

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

Member of Council of the Hakluyt Society

Committee member of Fontes Historiae Africanae

Member of Council of the Worcestershire Historical Society

President of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 2003-2006

Publications

‘“Our Mad Methodists”: Methodism, Missions and Abolitionism in Sierra Leone in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Wesley and Methodist Studies, 3 (2011), pp. 121-133.

Suzanne Schwarz, ed., Slave Captain: The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade, 2nd edition (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).

‘Commerce, Civilization and Christianity: The Development of the Sierra Leone Company’, in David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony J. Tibbles, eds., Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007). Republished in paperback in Spring 2010.

‘The Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Ann’, Yale University Library Gazette, 82, 3-4 (April 2008), pp. 155-76.

‘The Legacy of Melvill Horne’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 31, 2 (April 2007), pp. 88-94.

‘Attitudes to Liberty and Enslavement: The Career of James Irving, a Liverpool Slave Ship Surgeon and Captain’, The Historian, 93 (Spring 2007), pp. 20-26.

‘An Evangelical Clergyman and Missionary Advocate: The Career of the Reverend Melvill Horne, Minister of Christ Church, Macclesfield’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 153 (2004), pp. 1-31.

‘“Apostolick Warfare”: The Reverend Melvill Horne and the Development of Missions in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century’, The Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 85, 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 65-93.

In progress:

An Early African Colony: Contested Authority, Freedom and Identity in Sierra Leone in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century (forthcoming Yale University Press).

External Responsibilities

Honorary Fellow, Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull, 2010-

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow of The Huntington Library, California, 2009.

External Examiner, MA History, Manchester Metropolitan University.

External Reviewer, Periodic Subject Review (History), University of Northampton, 2008.

External Consultant, International Slavery Museum, National Museums Liverpool, 2007.