News Archive

The Fourth Global Conference on Slavery Past, Present and Future, part of a multi-year interdisciplinary project created and organized by Vice Dean and Professor of Law Karen E. Bravo, took place in Innsbruck, Austria, June 16-18. In the photo at left, Dean Bravo is shown presenting at a panel discussion during the conference.

The project provides new opportunities for dialog across disciplinary and national boundaries on the subject of slavery. Delegates came from across the globe, including the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, India, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The delegates’ disciplinary backgrounds included law, international relations, anthropology, history, philosophy, social work, and economic and political sciences. The group of participants from the event are shown in the photo at left. Dean Bravo is in the front row at the far right.

The participants’ papers addressed slavery in a variety of temporal and geographic spaces. The subject area included analysis of the nature and meaning of slavery from legal and social science perspectives; exploration of the legacies of slavery in contemporary societies around the world; discussion of human trafficking and other contemporary forms of exploitation; and identification of the challenges faced by law enforcement and victim service programs and projects.

The Fourth Global Conference built upon the First, Second and Third Global Conferences on Slavery Past, Present and Future, which were held in Mansfield College, Oxford in 2015; Prague, the Czech Republic in 2016; and Berlin, Germany in 2018. Dean Bravo co-hosted this year's conference with Ulrich Pallua of the University of Innsbruck. The conference was one of a series of year-long events honoring the 350th anniversary of the founding of the University of Innsbruck. Paulla is a Magister Doctor in the Department of English at the university.

Dean Bravo’s paper, “Slavery’s Legacy of Unknowing: On (Not) Finding My Ancestors,” explored the legacies of slavery from a personal perspective, including the process of Black ancestral search through the exploration of genetic, archival, and oral sources of information.

Inspired by increasing public and academic awareness and discussions of slavery and its legacies, and modern forms of exploitation such as human trafficking, Dean Bravo proposed the project and originally collaborated with an Oxford-based pioneer in interdisciplinary and transnational academic gatherings, to hold the First and Second Global meetings. She now organizes the multi-year project in collaboration with an international steering committee.