"Evidence that Demands a Verdict: Prince Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionists’ Case in Rome and the Vatican Response in the Seventeenth Century"

José Lingna Nafafé, University of Bristol

This workshop is open to the public and will be offered in hybrid with both in-person and remote attendance. Registration is only required for those who attend on Zoom. 

José Lingna Nafafé is Associate Professor of Lusophone Early Modern African History, Culture and Identity, co-Director of Teaching for the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, and co-Director of the MA in Black Humanities at the University of Bristol. His academic interests embrace a number of inter-related areas linked by the overarching themes of: the Black Atlantic abolitionist movement in the 17th Century; the Lusophone Atlantic African diaspora; seventeenth and eighteenth century African, Portuguese and Brazilian histories; slavery and wage-labour, 1792-1850; race, religion and ethnicity; Luso-African migrants’ culture and integration in the Northern and Southern Europe; ‘Europe in Africa’ and ‘Africa in Europe’; and the relationship between postcolonial theory and the Lusophone Atlantic.

In 2016, he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to undertake archival research for the project “Freedom and Lusophone African Diaspora in the Atlantic”. Dr Lingna Nafafé is a Co-Investigator for an ERC Advanced Grant on "Modern Marronage? The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World" (31/08/2028 – 31/08/2023) with Prof. Davidson, the Principal Investigator, at the University of Bristol; he is responsible for conducting a study of Quilombos in Brazil, past and present.

Dr Lingna Nafafé was nominated on ‘The BME Power List 2018 – Bristol’s 100 Most Influential BME People’ for having “advanced the history on resistance to enslavement through ground-breaking research which African Voices Forum shared at the Afrika Eye Film Festival in 2017.” His second monograph Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the 17th Century, Cambridge University Press, 2022 (part of the Studies on the African Diaspora series and features in the Cambridge lists in Atlantic history, Latin American history, African history, and the history of slavery).This innovative book provides substantial new evidence of the transnational and highly organised African abolitionist movement (including oppressed peoples of the Atlantic world such as, New Christians and Native Americans) in a crucial period in global history. His currently writing his third monograph on: Beyond Wilberforce’s Experiment in Abolitionism: The Yellow Fever Epidemic, Unfree Labour, Wages, and the Market, 1792-1850.