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Description
An Anti-Slavery Treatise from Medieval Iraq
A lecture by Kristina Richardson (University of Virginia)
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall
gallery@bgc.bard.edu
$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members
No late seating; admittance is not guaranteed after 6 pm.
In 869 CE, thousands of East African agricultural slaves rebelled in the southern Iraqi city of Basra and formed an independent state that fell to the Abbasids fourteen years later. A generation or two after, a small collective of Muslim philosophers based in Basra composed a revolutionary, anti-slavery treatise. In this lecture, Kristina Richardson will trace the development of abolitionist philosophies from the ninth-century slave revolt to the tenth-century treatise and beyond, offering an original excavation of medieval abolitionist thought.
A Global Middle Ages Lecture
Kristina Richardson is professor of history and Middle Eastern and South Asian languages and cultures at the University of Virginia. She specializes in histories of non-elite groups in the Middle East. She is the author of two monographs: Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World (2012) and Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration (2022). She also co-edited the Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver in 2021. She is currently writing a book called Black Basra on free and unfree South Asian and East African agricultural laborers in early Islamic Iraq.
Image: Spencer Collection, the New York Public Library. “Three black cannibals swimming in a silver sea; f. 77v” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 20, 2025.
Date & Time
Wed, Apr 15, 2026 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Venue Details
Bard Graduate Center
38 West 86th StreetNew York, New York 10024
