Professor James Walvin, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York in England, will deliver this term’s Wachovia Distinguished Public Lecture at the College of Charleston on Thursday, October 8th at 7 pm. The lecture will take place in Arnold Hall at the Jewish Studies Center, 96 Wentworth Street on the College of Charleston campus.
Dr. Walvin’s lecture will be on the 1781 “Zong Massacre,” one of the most notorious events in the grisly history of the transatlantic slave trade. This event, the subject of Walvin’s next book, involved the throwing overboard of 132 slaves in mid-Atlantic so that the captain and owners of the Zong could make an insurance claim for the lost “cargo.” When the insurers refused to pay up and the case came to trial, even though no one was ever held responsible for the mass murder, the surrounding publicity made the case one of the most influential in shifting British attitudes toward abolition of the slave trade. The case is also significant in cultural history for providing the subject for Turner’s famous painting The Slave Ship.
One ofthe world’s leading scholars on the history of slavery and the slave trade, Dr. Walvin is the author or editor of over thirty books, including most recently The Trader, the Owner, the Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery (2007) and a Short History of Slavery (2007).
Dr. Walvin’s lecture is part of an ongoing series of Wachovia Distinguished Public Lectures hosted annually by the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program (CLAW) at the College of Charleston.
Previous Wachovia lecturers have included historians and writers from all around the Atlantic. The CLAW program was established in 1994 with the goal of promoting public understanding of the Carolina lowcountry and its place in a broader international context.
For more information on the event or on the CLAW program in general, please contact Professor Simon Lewis in the English Department of the College of Charleston, at 843-953-1920 or lewiss@cofc.edu.
