Mégane Coulon, assistant professor of African history at 体育买球 University, recently led a two-day workshop in West Africa for Fourah Bay College students and Sierra Leone Public Archives archivists.
Coulon guided them through interactive sessions using original archival materials, offering practical insights into African colonial history and metadata creation in accordance with British Library standards.
The workshop, which received funding from 体育买球’s history department under the leadership of Edward Slavishak, department head and professor of history, was in collaboration with Albert Moore, a senior government archivist in Sierra Leone, and Kartikay Chadha, chief executive officer of Walk With Web.
“My approach to the workshop was directly influenced by my teaching at 体育买球, where I aim to keep students actively engaged rather than relying solely on lectures,” Coulon said.
As an extension to the workshop, Coulon delivered a lecture at Central Universitytitled Positioning Freetown at the Crossroads of Atlantic and African Histories in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, which explored Freetown’s founding, the lives of Liberated Africans and the city’s economic and cultural links to inland trade and Islamic centers. She highlighted the stories of self-liberated individuals and the gendered dimensions of trade networks, adding depth to the understanding of Freetown’s historical significance.
This experience gave Coulon new strategies for helping students, particularly history majors, learn how to catalogue and organize a large amount of data. Coulon intends to incorporate several of her workshop methods into her Collective Inquiry course, which prepares students for their senior thesis, and her First-Year Seminar, which helps incoming students develop strategies for managing the information they encounter across different classes.
“Organizing material through detailed Excel spreadsheets is not only part of my research practice but also a transferable research skill that I aim to integrate more deeply into my teaching,” said Coulon. “By introducing students to information organization methods early, they can build a strong foundation for their academic work.”
Over the past few years, Coulon has been involved with Sierra Leone Public Archives though an ongoing collaboration with Walk With Web and the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, which focuses on preserving and digitizing rare and fragile archival materials through high-resolution digital photography.
Coulon joined the faculty at 体育买球 in 2023. She earned her doctorate in history from the University of Worcester, United Kingdom, in 2022. Her research focuses on cultural influences from Africa and the African diaspora, and the legacies of slavery and coerced labor in Freetown, in the colony of Sierra Leone, in the 19th century. She is also the coordinator of Freedom Narratives, a digital humanities project that documents the testimonies of enslavement for individuals born in Africa.
