Emma Christopher is Associate Professor of History at the The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She is a documentary filmmaker and is the director, producer and researcher of They Are We, (New York: Icarus Film, 2014) which won five Best Documentary Awards, featured widely in the media, and was chosen as the United Nations’ Remembrance of Slavery film 2015. It has screened in more than 70 countries around the world. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon described the film and Emma’s work as, “an inspiration; a victory over slavery”. They Are We is the story of a remarkable reunion, 170 or so years after a family was driven apart by the ravages of the transatlantic slave trade. Her current project continues that research.

Professor Christopher’s latest book is called Freedom in White and Black and is the story of the only two men shipped to Australia as convicts for the crime of slave trading, and the enslaved men, women and children rescued from them. She previously published Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and A Merciless Place (New York (Oxford University Press, 2011), which won both the Kay Daniels and Ernest Scott prizes. She is the co-editor, with Marcus Rediker and Cassandra Pybus, of Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (University of California Press, 2007). She is an anti-slavery campaigner and previously worked at Anti-Slavery Australia. Co-sponsored by the Amistad Research Center and the Tulane Department of History.