Professor Olivette Otele

Olivette Otele is a Historian and Memory scholar, currently holding the position of Distinguished Research Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery in the Law Department at SOAS University of London. 

She holds a BA in British and American Literature, an MA in History and a PhD in European Colonial History and the Politics of Memory. She has written extensively on the history and legacies of colonial enslavement and on the legacies of the past. Her forthcoming book is about 15 ports that made European Empires through Slavery (Basic books, 2026).

She is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and a Fellow and a former Vice President of the Royal Historical Society. She received an Honorary Degree from Concordia University, Canada (2022). She was a visiting Professor at Huron University, Canada and a visiting professor at the College de France. She was a judge of the International Man Booker Prize and chair of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. She was Chair of Prix Goncourt des Lyceens du Royaume Uni (French Embassy in the UK).

Otele is regular contributor to the press (BBC, Guardian, CNN, New Yorker, Elle, Vogue Italia, GQ), a consultant for films in the US (the latest are the docu-fiction African Queens (Netflix) and movie Chevalier (Dysney+). Her third book African Europeans (2020) was ‘A Guardian Best book of 2020’, was shortlisted for both the Orwell Prize for Political Writing (2021) and for the LA Times Book Prize (2022). Professor Otele also advises policy-makers, banks and charities on colonial history and restorative justice (Welsh Government Audit on Slavery and Colonialism, the Newspaper the Guardian‘s project Cotton Capital).

• European and African Empires
• Colonial History
• Colonial Enslavement and legacies
• Histories of people of African descent
• Memory studies
• Restorative Justice
• Memoryscape and Heritage