Welcome to the Cluster of Excellence at the 
Bonn Center for Dependency & Slavery Studies 

We regularly invite renowned international scholars from across the world to present their ongoing research related to asymmetrical dependency and slavery. In return we offer the possibility to publish a revised version of their lectures as part of our Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Publications.

See what's coming up between April and June!

Published in The Routledge History of Loneliness

Edited By Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus, Deborah Simonton.

In this chapter Dr. Jennifer Leetsch interweaves the subject of loneliness with an example of early-19th-century Black life-writing, the slave narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831), the first Black life narrative by a woman published in Britain, at a time of immense social rupture and change effected by anti-slavery and abolitionist politics. Locating the intersections of displacement and community in slavery life-writing across the Black Atlantic, this literary analysis contrasts the many contested communities at work in Prince’s text with the loneliness of her experiences in, through and after slavery. The chapter argues that loneliness, fragmentation and separation are fundamentally part of the slave narrative, just as much as the existence and continual rearticulation of Black community and solidarity. By focusing on loneliness as a condition constitutive of the genre, the chapter excavates the dynamics between the intimate feelings of loneliness, social isolation and systemic alienation as experienced by enslaved people, as well as inconspicuous yet wilful forms of community-building and acts of care that are activated in relation to and articulated through experiences of oppression, dehumanisation and objectification.

Download the full Chapter here

Without an analysis of enslavement at the very centre of its operation, can the study of fashion ever really be critical? Can it contemplate how fashion commodities, communication, and experience actually contribute to our cultural life?

For this Special Issue, we invite submissions of 6,000 word papers on any relevant period of history or on contemporary sources and situations. 500-1,000 word reviews of relevant scholarly publications or cultural work are also of interest.

We are particularly interested in scholarly work that explores clearly defined and contextualised instances of asymmetric dependency (as opposed to generalised or decontextualized fashion images/communication about enslavement etc). BCDSS referee the submissions and will offer translation support where necessary. Articles to be published in this JGS’s special issue must not consist of previously published scholarly work.

We are pleased to congratulate our BCDSS Researcher Dr. Eva Marie Lehner on the publication of her dissertation! 

"Taufe – Ehe – Tod. Praktiken des Verzeichnens in frühneuzeitlichen Kirchenbüchern"

(Baptism – Marriage – Death. Practices of indexing in early modern Church records)

With the recording of all baptisms, weddings and funerals, pastors created the first civil registers of their parishes in the 16th century.