Prof. John Oldfield is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation and Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) at the University of Hull.

His books include ‘Chords of Freedom’: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester University Press, 2007) and Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: an International History of Antislavery, c. 1787-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He specializes in the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world (1750–1850).

He is Co-Investigator on the AHRC project, ‘The Antislavery Usable Past’, and is currently working with the Universities of Liverpool and Nottingham on heritage-based anti-slavery projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. Before moving to Hull in 2013 he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton and Director of the Southampton Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies.