Professor Randy Brown pinches his fingers together while speaking to students at a table.

Xavier professor receives $2M for research into Caribbean slavery

Nov 24, 2025

A Xavier historian been awarded a grant to investigate slavery and the law in British Guiana, now Guyana.

Xavier Professor of History Randy M. Browne, Ph.D., is part of an international team that will analyze the testimony of hundreds of enslaved people who endured British slavery.

The groundbreaking project, “Voices in Slavery’s Archive: Law, Place and Testimony in British Guiana,” will create digital resources comprising words spoken by enslaved people, rather than data about them. The project has received a £1.5 million grant (approximately $2 million) from the UK-based Arts and Humanities Research Council.

“Having researched and taught the history of slavery in Guyana for nearly two decades, I could not be more excited about the opportunity to work on this project with esteemed colleagues in Guyana and the UK,” Browne said. “I’m confident that the work we’ll do together over the next few years will transform the way that scholars — and the broader public — understand the experiences of enslaved people in Guyana, including the ways they used the law to resist and survive slavery under some of the most horrific conditions in the world.”

Browne and his colleagues will digitise, map, and analyse the largest collection of first-person testimony of enslaved people from the Caribbean in existence: the “Reports of the Protectors of Slaves.” These records are held in the UK’s National Archives and allow researchers to examine how enslaved people used the courts to make complaints relating to family life, work, health, violence, and a host of other issues. The team will produce an online resource, including the full text of the enslaved people’s complaints, and images of the original documents to make them accessible to researchers anywhere in the world.

A collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, Xavier University, the University of Guyana, the University of Sheffield Digital Humanities Institute, the National Archives (UK), the Walter Rodney National Archives of Guyana, and Guyana SPEAKS, this project will pioneer new approaches to the history of slavery by combining archival research with digital tools, community engagement and family and community history.

The project will run from March 2026 to February 2029 and will host its first workshops in Guyana and the UK in 2026.