ALES event "Finding Billy Waters: Black Lives in the Archives and New Resources for Educators"
Speakers: Dr Mary Shannon, Dr Ben Marsh, Angelina Morrison and Selina Scott
William ‘Billy’ Waters: busker, sailor, immigrant, father, lover, extraordinary talent, and a forgotten Black celebrity from Regency London. Delve into Waters’ life and hear about an exciting collaborative project which provides innovative free resources for schools and education teams to support the teaching of race, disability, migration, and storytelling, underpinned by new archival research into Billy Waters' life and times.
About our speakers:
Dr Ben Marsh is a Reader in History at the University of Kent, and the educational lead of the Age of Revolution: 1775-1848 project, which creates innovative open-access materials to support learning in schools and museums. He has published two award-winning books on the social and economic history of the Atlantic world, an edited volume on revolutionary pedagogy, and has particular research interests in histories of failure, marginalised stories, race and revolution. He designed and co-developed the collaborative resource: Billy Waters: Songs from the Shadows.
Angeline Morrison is an award-winning folk singer and songwriter, whose work is devoted to honouring the stories and voices of the lost, forgotten and erased Black ancestors in British history. Her 2022 album, 'The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience', was The Guardian's Folk Album of the Year.
Selena Scott is a portrait artist who navigates identity through a variety of mediums, including oil painting, film, textiles, and animation. Grounded in extensive research involving historical archives and spoken stories, she explores themes of trauma, racism, and colonialism, rooted in her Caribbean heritage. Selena illustrated the graphic novel, 'Billy Waters: Songs from the Shadows', and is also the author and illustrator of the 'Cambridge Black History Colouring Book'.
Dr Mary L. Shannon's new book, 'Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain', (Yale 2024), tells the story of Regency London’s forgotten Black celebrity. Mary is a writer and Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Roehampton, London. She's the author of the award-winning, ‘Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street’, and a self-confessed fan of archives, the dustier the better!