Prof. Dr. Henry B. Lovejoy

Heinz Heinen Fellow (Senior)

Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies
May 2027–August 2027

University of Colorado Boulder, US
hlovejoy@colorado.edu

Title of current research project: "Fragmented Archives to Spatial Models: Methods for Mapping African Indenture Globally"

Henry B. Lovejoy
© Henry B. Lovejoy

Academic Profile

Fragmented Archives to Spatial Models: Methods for Mapping African Indenture Globally

This project builds on LiberatedAfricans.org, an award-winning digital project and archive documenting over 700,000 people involuntarily indentured under government schemes claiming to end the slave trade between 1800 and the foundation of the International Labour Organization. Histories of enslaved Africans rarely explain inland origins. I treat this silence not as impossibility, but as a methodological problem of measurable spatial uncertainty. During the fellowship, I will refine data for the more than 200,000 indentured Africans registered by name and generate new data for the first spatial statistical model showing when and where their inland migrations began and continued in diaspora during the global blockade of the slave trade. Drawing on a published metadata schema for mapping conflict in precolonial Africa and a controlled vocabulary of 34 African subregions (AfricanRegions.org), the model aligns people registered by governments with specific instances of inland conflict. In collaboration with the Methods Lab at BCDSS, the result will lead toward an interactive, map based digital research infrastructure that reframes abolition as both humanitarian effort and a crime against humanity.

since 2022
Associate Professor in History and Director of the Digital Slavery Research Lab, University of Colorado Boulder, US

2008–2012
PhD in History, University of California Los Angeles, US

  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, 2025–2026
  • Provost’s Faculty Achievement and Research Impact Award, CU Boulder, 2025
  • New Directions Fellowship, Mellon Foundation, 2021–2024
  • 2026. Becoming Sarah Forbes Bonetta: A Yorùbá Woman in Queen Victoria’s Court. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  • 2025. "Conceptualizing ‘Liberated Africans’ and Slave Trade Abolition: Government Schemes to Indenture Enslaved People Captured from Slavery, 1800–1920." Past & Present 269(1): 169–236.
  • With Ashton Wiens, Zachary Mullen, and Eric Vance. 2022. "A Modelling Strategy to Estimate Conditional Probabilities of African Origins: The Collapse of the Oyo Empire and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1817–1836." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 185(3): 1247–1270.
  • 2022: "Mapping Conflict during the Era of the Slave Trade: Metadata Schema for a Spatial Statistical Model and Digital Archive of Enforced Migrations in Pre-Colonial Africa." Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series: Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies 12: 5–38.