Ella Crean and Laura Young are third-year undergraduate students in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. They worked with the Davy Notebooks Project team, supervised by Dr Eleanor Bird, and designed these learning materials in 2023, as part of a work placement module (ENGL329 Work Placement: Culture, Heritage, and Creative Industries).
Between April-July 2023, two students in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, Hannah Parker (also in the Department of History) and Alex Raby Buck, were employed as researchers on a project examining Humphry Davy’s links to transatlantic slavery supervised by Dr Eleanor Bird. Hannah and Alex researched into one area of Davy’s life: his connections with Robert Farquhar (1755-1836). Farquhar held people in slavery in plantations in Antigua and Grenada. Farquhar was the stepfather of Jane, Humphry Davy’s wife. Hannah researched Farquhar and his plantations, while Alex engaged with critical theorists to uncover the fragmented archives of enslaved people on Farquhar’s plantations.
This project was funded by the Davy Notebooks Project, the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, and a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (Lancaster University) Decolonisation Network Grant.