Dr Simon Buck
Research Fellow (University of Edinburgh’s Historical Links to African Enslavement and Colonialism), 2022-2024
Home Institution: Northumbria University
Dr Simon Buck is an historian and medical humanities scholar with interests in the US South, histories of medicine and music, and the impacts of slavery-derived wealth on British charities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr Buck is an Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) Research Fellow investigating the University of Edinburgh’s historical links to slavery. He will be documenting the university’s vast and varied connections to African enslavement in Britain’s colonies. He is particularly interested in investigating how different schools within the university - from Medicine to Music - were entangled in the Atlantic slavery economy. He is looking forward to working with other Fellows and community organisers towards radically altering how we view the university’s own history, and confront the legacies of British slavery and colonialism today, particularly educational and health inequalities. As well as this current role, Buck is currently employed as a researcher at Lothian Health Services Archive (LHSA), based at the university’s Centre for Research Collections, on a collaborative project with NHS Lothian and NHS Lothian Charity on the origins of hospital philanthropy in Edinburgh, looking primarily at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh’s historical connections to slavery-associated wealth. This project builds on his recent work at Northumbria University on possible ties between slavery, colonialism, and educational philanthropy in the North East of England in the eighteenth century.