Event

Natalie Zacek is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, where she has taught since she received her PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University. Her first monograph, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670-1776 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) received the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize, and in autumn 2023 Louisiana State University Press published her second book, Thoroughbred Nation: Making America at the Racetrack, 1791-1900. She has also published widely on the histories of plantation society in the American South and the British West Indies in journals such as Slavery and Abolition, Early American Studies, and the Journal of Global Slavery.

For the past five years Dr. Zacek has been the University of Manchester's faculty lead in the institution's examination of its historic links to transatlantic slavery, and a member of the executive committee of Universities Studying Slavery. She co-curated exhibitions on this topic at Manchester's John Rylands Library, the University's repository of rare books and manuscripts, and its Portico Library, a private subscription library and newsroom founded in 1806.

Dr. Zacek is now working on a new project about later Georgian London and the West Indian absentee planters and their families who attracted both fascination and outrage during their sojourns in the city. Her MCEAS seminar paper is an early fruit of this project.

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