Christienna Fryar

Christienna Fryar is a writer and historian of Britain, the Caribbean, and the British Empire. At the heart of her work is the conviction that Britain and its history cannot be understood in isolation from the Caribbean. A former academic, she was the founding convener of the MA Black British History, the first taught masters program of its kind in the UK, which launched at Goldsmiths, University of London in September 2020. Before that, she was a Lecturer in the History of Slavery and Unfree Labour at the University of Liverpool, where she also was the director of the MA in International Slavery. Before moving to the UK in 2017, she was an assistant professor of history at SUNY Buffalo State, an urban comprehensive college in Western New York. In 2020, she was named a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and has appeared on TV, radio, and podcasts. She occasionally hosts episodes of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking and has interviewed authors for Bristol Festival of Ideas and Intelligence Squared. As a freelance consultant, she works with organizations to use stories about the past to face the realities of the present and work toward a just future, and she has worked with primary schools, tv production teams, and the Church Commissioners. She is a trustee of the Black Cultural Archives. She is currently writing Entangled Lands: A Caribbean History of Britain, which will be published by Allen Lane (Penguin)/University of California Press.