“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Our theme for TORCH Goes Digital this week is "Journeys". Working with the great wealth of material created by the incredible researchers at the University of Oxford and beyond, the TORCH Team has curated a brilliant programme of blog posts, podcasts, news articles, poems, performances and more. In the article, 'I wish there was a world for us': the search for utopic recognition in queer comics, Roan Runge, a member of TORCH's Queer Studies Network, explored how comics have the potential to create positive spaces of recognition for the LGBTQIA+ community. Dr Stefano Evangelista, Associate Profesor of English, Fellow and Tutor in English at Trinity College Oxford, discussed the exhibition, All the World’s a Page – How to Travel the World with Literature, the result of a year-long series of workshops and virtual meetings around the topic of Transnational Citizenship, which was the product of the Oxford-Berlin partnership. The podcast and video, Britain's History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery, explores how transatlantic slavery, just like the abolition movements, affected every space and community in Britain, from Cornwall to the Clyde, from dockyard alehouses to country estates. Editor and author Ryan Hanley (Fellow in History, University of Oxford) joined an expert panel, including Bob Harris (Professor of British History, University of Oxford), and Padraic Scanlan (Assistant Professor in International History, LSE and Research Associate in History and Economics, Cambridge University). This event was chaired by Sebabatso Manoeli (Lecturer in African History, University of Oxford), and explored how the financial, architectural and societal legacies of translatlantic slavery remains, scattered across the country in museums and memorials, philanthropic institutions and civic buildings, empty spaces and unmarked graves.
