Universities Studying Slavery Now Stretches Across the Atlantic Ocean!

It is with great pleasure that the UVA President’s Commission on Slavery and the University gets to announce that University of Glasgow in Scotland has joined the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium. USS has become a true international movement of scholars and institutions devoted to helping schools acknowledge their past complicity in human bondage and racism and also develop programs and initiatives that promote reconciliation.

The University of Glasgow was founded in 1451. By the mid-eighteenth century, Glasgow was becoming an important trading hub in the Trans-Atlantic basin, centering upon sugar, rum, and tobacco. Thus, the university and the city have deep ties to the Atlantic Slave Trade, to lucrative commodities produced by enslaved people, and even to the development of antislavery thought in Scotland.

We are additionally thrilled to report that Simon Newman, Sir Denis Brogan Professor of American History and Director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies at the University of Glasgow, will lead the school’s effort.