Dr Érika Melek Delgado

Érika Melek Delgado is a Lecturer in the History of Empire in the Department of History at King's College London, United Kingdom. Her research and publications focus on Imperial History, African History, Diaspora and Digital Humanities (DH). She is the main investigator of the project 'Historical African Childhoods' (HAC Project), and the co-director of the ‘Freedom Narratives Project’, both are 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 The Leverhulme Trust and The British Academy fellowships.

Formerly, she had a two-year post as a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas, at York University, Canada. She received a fellowship to do her PhD in History at the University of Worcester, UK, and an MPhil in Comparative History from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil. She also coordinated the project related to digitalization and of primary sources from Sierra Leone for the Endangered Archives for the British Library. She is also part of the director team for the Walk With Web Co. During her undergraduate studies at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil, she was awarded the Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program (ELAP) grant.

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 

I teach modern history, British Imperie, West Africa and Diaspora

Expertise and public engagement

I have worked on 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)
• E Melek Delgado, ‘Digital Sources for the Slave Trade’, Oxford Encyclopedia of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and the Diaspora in African History, Martin Klein, Editor in Chief, Oxford University Press (Forthcoming, 2023)
• 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.