Michael Forbes is a photographer, painter and curator based in Nottingham. He currently is curating a programme at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham and has worked extensively in the past with Godfried Donkor.

Alex Farquharson is a freelance curator, writer, editor and university lecturer who was recently appointed director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Nottingham. Recently he co-curated British Art Show 6, with Andrea Schlieker, which visited Nottingham in May 2006, and If Everybody had an Ocean: Brian Wilson, an Art Exhibition, at Tate St Ives and CAPC Musée dArt Contemporain, Bordeaux.

Professor Dick Geary is professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham and is co-director of the Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS) at the University of Nottingham. ISOS seeks to pursue and develop research on contemporary, as well as historical, slavery in all parts of the globe and through all historical periods. Geary is currently in receipt of a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to explore Artisans and Revolt in Brazil and Western Europe, 1780-1850.

Dr Sheryllynne Haggerty is a History lecturer at the University of Nottingham and also a part of the ISOS. Her research centres around the Atlantic Slave Trade in the 18th & 19th Centuries. Her first monograph, entitled The British-Atlantic Trading Community; Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods was published in 2006.
 
Jane-Marie Collins is a lecturer at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nottingham. She is also part of the ISOS. Past research includes investigation into Indianism and Brazilian Literature and post-colonialism in Latin America. Her current research comprises comparative gender histories and race relations of slave societies in the Americas.

Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier is a lecturer in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. In her research she is currently exploring African-American visual art and literature, looking at the African burial grounds in New York and the literature of slaves.  She is also part of the ISOS.

Dr Alan Rice is a Reader in American Cultural Studies at the University of Central Lancashire. He has research interests in African American literature and culture and the black Atlantic and has published extensively on this topic. In 2007, he guest curated Trade & Empire at the Whitworth Art Gallery in to commemorate the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Frank Abbott tutors Fine Art undergraduates and postgraduate students at Nottingham Trent University, particularly in relation to new media practice. He is also active in developing external projects with creative and cultural organisations including the Radiator Symposium and the New Digital Communities project. Between 2001 to 2005, he founded and directed Screenplay, at Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham. He has also undertaken extensive research into the Nottingham Lace Trade.

NAE/CCAN/NTU Friday morning talks at Broadway

11th January

Kobena Mercer is a cultural worker and critic whose varied work on the politics of representation in African diasporic visual arts has inaugurated an important line of inquiry into post-identitarian cultural politics. He has taught at UC Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness Program and in the fall of 1996 he is a visiting professor in the Africana Studies department at N.Y.U. He contributes frequently to Screen, ArtForum, and Sight & Sound.

Kobena Mercer’s Friday Morning talk, as part of the NTU talks series, will be followed by the Lace & Slavery Symposium.

18th January

Hew Locke is an artist who was raised in Guyana and is now based in Brixton. A graduate from the Royal College of Art sculpture school, Locke has had numerous solo exhibitions including work at The De La Warr Pavillion, the V&A and was recently part of British Art Show 6.

8th February

The Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun & Anjalika Sagar) was founded in London in 2002 and comprises Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun and Richard Couzins. The group takes its name from the structure in the inner ear that establishes our sense of gravity and orientation. Through a variety of archival footage – encompassing recent digital news footage and 35mm film shot in the 1940s – the narrative of Otolith’s ‘essay-films’ weave together public histories and private memories. The group exhibit internationally and last year were selected to be part of the Tate Triennial.