6th March 2025 – Dr Zachary Williams:

‘A “capital part” of Salvation: Abraham Booth on the Necessity of Holiness in the Christian Life’

Dr Zachary Williams, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and last year’s recipient of the Brackney Angus Travel Bursary will present this seminar based on his research on Abraham Booth, minister, opponent of slavery and founding member of the Baptist Education Society.

23rd October 2024 – Dr Saptarshi Mallick:

‘William Carey and Sati: A Baptist Missionary’s Interrogation of a Social Evil’

 Watch the video here:

Dr Saptarshi Mallick is Assistant Professor at the Department of American Studies (Research Area for American Literary and Cultural History with a Focus on (Trans-) Nationality and Space), University of Graz, Austria. From September 2019 to March 2024, he worked as an Assistant Professor of English at Sukanta Mahavidyalaya, Dhupguri, Jalpaiguri, University of North Bengal.

30th May 2024 – Dr Cindy Aalders:

‘Life Writing as Spiritual Legacy: Lessons from the Steele Collection.’

The Steele Collection at the Angus Library holds the manuscripts of generations of religious women’s letters, diaries, and other life writings. In this paper I explore the afterlives of those writings. Looking beyond contemporary uses, it asks how manuscripts were preserved and how they functioned in religious communities after the death of their authors. Scholars of manuscript cultures have highlighted the ways in which an historiographical emphasis on print culture has obscured women’s engagement in eighteenth-century intellectual and literary worlds. What does a consideration of manuscript cultures reveal regarding women’s engagement in eighteenth-century religious worlds? While illuminating previously hidden activities of women as religious authors, this paper also considers the future readers of women’s manuscripts. By tracing manuscripts across generations, we find that as women’s writings continued to be read and cherished as spiritual legacy, they formed community memory and shaped religious identity.

‘The Photographic Archive of the Upoto Mission, Congo Free State: Some Reflections on Using Visual Sources to Expand Mission Histories’

By Dr Amy King – A recording of this video is available here:

“This talk will reflect upon my doctoral research undertaken at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, exploring the photographic archive of Upoto, a Baptist Missionary Society station established in what was the northern Congo Free State in 1890. My thesis was titled: ‘Visual Testaments: Re-collecting the Photographic Archive of the Upoto Mission 1890 – 1915’. This research project drew upon the unusually rich photographic sources connected with the missionaries who were stationed there in order to interrogate the historical evidence they contain. Methodologically I was interested in how this visual evidence worked with and against different kinds of textual and material sources which have survived from Upoto outside of Africa. My research was concerned with the kinds of unique historical evidence that photographs contain, and what visual sources can contribute to our understanding of the past. My doctoral thesis interrogated the visual strategies through which mission work at Upoto was represented for audiences in Britain in the late nineteenth century and the tensions between the public narratives of evangelical work and more privately documented experiences. It also examined the diverse, complex and evolving relationships between British missionaries and local Bapoto and Bangombe people at Upoto as the Christian community was established. My original study of the missionary archive from Upoto has generated new insights into the presence, actions and experiences of Congolese people who lived at Upoto during a period of immense social and cultural upheaval brought by colonialism”.

By Rev Ruth Gouldbourne – A recording of this seminar is available here:

By Rev. Ray Rhodes – A recording of this seminar is available here:

By Dr Reid Trulson – A recording of this seminar is available here:

By Landon Adams – A recording of this seminar is available here:

By Prof Sally Shuttleworth

No recording of this seminar is currently available.

By Dr Chris Voke

No recording of this seminar is currently available.

By Dr Saptarshi Mallik – A recording of this seminar is available here:

By Dr Karen Smith

No recording of this seminar is currently available.

By Dr Tom Buchanan – A recording of this seminar is available here:

By Rev Dr Keith Jones
A recording of this seminar is available here:

By Dr Julian Thompson
A recording of this seminar is available here:

By Prof Isabel Rivers (QMUL)
No recording of this seminar is currently available.

Q&A with Dr Lynn Robson
A recording of this seminar is available here: