Post by Sienna Gianneri

On Friday, I graduated from Durham University with a First Class Honours degree in History, having achieved overall First Class results in both my second and third years. Reflecting on my third year, in which I achieved an average mark of 74, I am most proud to have received a mark of 78 for my Dissertation. In this study, I advanced an original reinterpretation of two volumes of interviews conducted with formerly enslaved people, arguing that formerly enslaved women actively reconstructed their experiences of slavery through the remembered mother figure. This reinterpretation challenged decades of scholarship discrediting these interviews as reliable historical sources, reframing them as important sites of preservation, knowledge production and resistance. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone at Durham, especially within the History Department, for their support throughout three incredibly rewarding years of study. Now, I’m looking forward to a summer of travel before I return to Sky in September to join the Business Graduate Scheme, following a successful internship last summer as the Corporate Affairs Intern.