Annual James McCune Smith Lectures
Inaugurated in 2015, an annual lecture honouring James McCune Smith, who studied for three degrees at Glasgow, becoming the first African American to receive a medical degree.
- 2025: The Politics of the Archive: Slavery Studies and the State of Method, Professor Marisa Fuentes (Associate Professor, Departments of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University)
- 2024: The Black Modernist Muse in Interwar London, Dr Rochelle Rowe (University of Edinburgh)
- 2023: "We black folks had to wear lowells”: Negro Cloth, Enslaved People, and Legacy of Lowell Manufacturing, Dr Jonathan Michael Square (Parsons School of Design, New York City, USA)
- 2022: "I Determined to Effect My Escape”: The 1855 Flight of John Ross and Fugitive Cosmopolitan Routes to Freedom, Professor Natasha Lightfoot (University of Columbia)
- 2021: 'A voice from the North': black women in academia and activism in contemporary Europe', Professor Olivette Otele (University of Bristol)
- 2020: Since 1804: Haiti and the Movement of Caribbean Freedom, Prof Matthew J. Smith (UCL)
- 2018: '“Ran away from her Master…a Negroe Girl named Thursday”: Examining Evidence of Punishment, Isolation, and Trauma in Nova Scotia and Quebec Fugitive Slave Advertisements', Professor Charmaine A. Nelson McGill University, Montreal
- 2017: 'A Harvest of Ancestral Voices: Slavery and the Future of African people’, Prof. Kofi Anyidoho (University of Ghana-Legon)
- 2016: ‘Slavery, Torture, and Civilization in the United States 1820-1860’, (Prof. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina)
- 2015: ‘Run away from his Master: freedom-seeking slaves in eighteenth-century Britain’, (Prof. Simon Newman, University of Glasgow)
The annual James McCune Smith Lecture has been generously supported by the Merchants House of Glasgow since 2021.