Dr Érika Melek Delgado

Érika Melek Delgado is Lecturer in the History of Empire in the Department of History at King's College London, United Kingdom. At King's, she is also the coordinator of the 'King's Past' project developed by the Department of History. Her research and publications focus on the history of empire, African history, diaspora and digital humanities (DH). She is principal investigator of the Historical African Childhoods (HAC) project and co-director of the Freedom Narratives Project, both DH projects. Previously, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Language, Literature and Culture at King's College London. For her Early Career Fellow position, Érika was approved for fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy.

Previously, she was a two-year Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University, Canada. She received a scholarship for her PhD in History from the University of Worcester, UK, and an MPhil in Comparative History from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil. She also co-ordinated the project to digitise primary sources from Sierra Leone for the British Library's Endangered Archives. She is also one of the directors of the Walk With Web Co. During her undergraduate studies at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil, she was awarded the Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program (ELAP) scholarship.

Research interests and Phd supervision 

• West Africa History
• History of Childhood in Africa and Diaspora
• Atlantic Slavery
• Connections between the precolonial, and the colonial state in Africa
• African diaspora in Cuba and Brazil

Teaching 

Modern history, history of empire, West Africa and the diaspora; global south history.

Expertise and public engagement

Digital Humanities and public history projects. 

Selected publications

• 'E Melek Delgado, P E. Lovejoy, H Lovejoy, and K Chadha (eds) Regenerated Identities – Documenting African Lives, Trenton: Africa World Press (2022)
• E Melek Delgado, ‘Freedom Narratives: The West African Person as the Central Focus for a Digital Humanities Database’, History in Africa, 48 (2021), pp. 35-59
• E Melek Delgado, ‘Liberated African “Children” in Sierra Leone: colonial classifications of “child” and “childhood”, 1808-1819’, in Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896, eds. Henry B. Lovejoy and Richard Anderson, Rochester: University of Rochester Press (2020)
• ‘Digital Sources for the Slave Trade’, In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford University Press. [forthcoming]. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.ORE_AFH-01182.R1
• E Melek Delgado, ‘Identidades em trânsito: o caso dos africanos livres na primeira colônia britânica da África Ocidental’, Revista de Ciências Humanas, 14, 2 (2014), pp. 356-372.