Olivette Otele

Otele has written for the BBC's HistoryExtra, The Conversation and Times Higher Education. She has written and contributed to several books. Her book, Afro-Europeans: a Short History, is scheduled for publication in 2020 with Hurst Publishers. Her second book, Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies, is due in 2019 with Palgrave Macmillan.

It was announced in late October 2019 that Otele had been appointed as the first Professor of the History of Slavery at Bristol University. She assumed her post in January 2020, and began a two-year research project to examine Bristol's connection to the transatlantic slave trade. It is anticipated her study will become "a landmark in the way Britain examines, acknowledges and teaches the history of enslavement."

Otele gave the key-note address at the Social History Society Annual Conference, University of Lincoln, 11 June 2019. In May 2019 she was elected to Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society.

In 2018, at the age of 48, Otele became the first black woman to be made Professor of History in the United Kingdom. She acknowledged that her promotion to the professoriate took longer because she has caring responsibilities as a mother to two children and because she is a woman of colour. The Race, Ethnicity & Equality Report published by the Royal Historical Society in October 2018 found that only 0.5% of historians working in UK universities are black. Until Otele's promotion there had never been a black woman Professor of History in the UK. Otele hopes that her appointment will 'open the door for many hard-working women, especially black women in academia'. On her promotion Otele commented that "any success that is used only to improve one's own life is a waste of possibilities. That is why being the first black female history professor does not mean anything to me if I'm not given and can't find means to bring others up." Otele also highlighted the difficulties she encountered in becoming a Professor: "I've worked very hard and kept pushing and had a family...It's hard. I'm tired. It's bleak." The Vice-Chancellor of Bath Spa University, Professor Susan Rigby described Otele as "world-class and internationally respected". Otele announced her promotion from her active Twitter account.

She has participated in programmes on BBC Radio 4. and Dan Snow's History Hit podcast. She is part of the John Blanke Project, a collaboration of artists and historians celebrating black Tudors. Otele spoke at the 2018 Winchester History Weekend, How Africans Changed Early Modern Europe. She considered outstanding Africans and Europeans who are not otherwise remembered in popular history books.

Otele was named on the BBC 100 Women 2018 List which celebrates influential and inspiring women from around the world. She appears at number 69, alongside Abisoye Ajayi-Akinfolarin, Nimco Ali and Uma Devi Badi.

Otele has participated in several major research grants looking at the African diaspora. She looks at the way the societies of Britain and France address citizenship. She has studied the Atlantic slave trade. Otele was the Principal Investigator for the project People of African Descent in the 21st Century: Knowledge and Cultural Production in Reluctant Sites of Memory, which received £24,022 in funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project ran from May 2017 to November 2018.

Otele was born in Cameroon and grew up in Paris, France. She is of Cameroonian heritage. Otele studied at the Sorbonne University, working on European colonial and post-colonial history. She completed her BA in Literature in 1998, and her MA in 2000. She received her PhD in 2005 for a doctoral thesis entitled Mémoire et politique: l'enrichissement de Bristol par le commerce triangulaire, objet de polémique. Her dissertation looked at the city of Bristol's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Olivette Otele, FRHistS (born 1970) is an historian and academic, who is currently Professor of History of Slavery at Bristol University and Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society. Previously she was a Professor of History at Bath Spa University. She is an expert on the links between history, memory and geopolitics in relation to French and British colonial pasts. She is the first Black woman to be appointed to a Professorial Chair in History in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Histoire de l'esclavage transatlantique britannique and Afro-Europeans: A Short History.