Érika Melek Delgado is Lecturer in the History of Empire in the Department of History at King's College London. At King's, she is also Associate Director of the King's Past project, a collaborative research initiative developed by the Department of History. Her research and publications concentrate on the history of empire, African history, diaspora and digital humanities (DH). She is the Principal Investigator of the Historical African Childhoods (HAC) project and Co-Director of the Freedom Narratives Project, two Digital Humanities projects. She is currently leading a British Library – Endangered Archive Program in Cuba for the digitalisation of documents endangered. The project, which was developed in partnership with the University of Havana, the National Library and the Institute of Literature and Language, all of which are in Cuba, is entitled Preserving records of the contribution of enslaved people and their descendants to Cuban academic and intellectual life, 19th century (EAP1757). Previously, she was involved for a period of ten years with EAP projects in partnership with the Sierra Leone Public Archives.

Prior to this appointment, she held the position of Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Language, Literature and Culture at King's College London. Regarding her Early Career Fellow position, Erika was granted fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy. Furthermore, she was a two-year Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University, Canada. She was awarded 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. In addition, she fulfils the role of director at Walk With Web Co. Prior to the award of her PhD, she was the recipient of 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, ‘Digital Sources for the Slave Trade’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, (2025) 
• 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.