Nicola Frith

Nicola Frith is a specialist in Francophone Postcolonial Studies and Slavery Studies. She is the author of a monograph entitled The French Colonial Imagination: Writing the Indian Uprisings, 1857–58, from Second Empire to Third Republic (Lexington Books, 2014), which considers how France’s colonial imagination in the nineteenth century was constructed in relation to its greatest rival, the British. In recent years, her research has turned towards more contemporary themes and now focuses on the memories and legacies of slavery and their effects on French society today. Of particular interest are the socio-political contexts that are shaping activist movements and memorialization processes within and beyond the French nation-state. Her AHRC-funded research project, entititled 'Mapping Memories of Slavery: Commemoration, Community and Identity in Contemporary France', is working to map activist networks within the French Republic and to foreground the complex and creative responses led by citizen groups as they engage culturally and politically with the afterlives of the history of slavery and the slave trade. A growing interest in this area is the pressing question of reparations for slavery as a means to addressing the legacies of slavery in the present-day.