Exploring the History of Archaeology, Genetics and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Join Sarah Abel for a discussion of her research in genetics and identity.

EUROTAST is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN), supporting a new generation of science and humanities researchers to uncover and interpret new evidence on the history and contemporary legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. The network will be running for four years from 2012 to 2016, and will enable 13 PhD researchers in history, archaeology, social anthropology and population genetics to work collaboratively across disciplines to provide new perspectives on this history. The research will focus on three themes: Origins, Life Cycles, and Legacies, which they hope will not only lead them to further detail the slave trading system, but also help demonstrate how slavery fundamentally shaped the cultural and biological experiences of people of African descent around the world.

Sarah Abel is a British PhD researcher, based at the International Centre for Research on Slaveries (Centre international de recherches sur les esclavages, CIRESC) in Paris, France. Abel specializes in the history of slave resistance and race relations in Latin American and Caribbean.  Overall, her research aims to look at how the rise in public access to genetic technologies and data is changing the ways in which we think about personal identity, ancestry, and 'race' in different parts of the Atlantic world today.