When my new role as professor of the history of slavery at the University of Bristol was announced, some peoples reaction was, about time. The role, in which I will research the universitys ties with enslavement, will bring together various existing scholarships, and is part of a debate that has been taking place for decades.

But in further exploring the past of the institution within the broader history of the city, I hope to help the public as well as the university to better understand its place, role and responsibilities towards Bristols inhabitants. My research should have a significant impact on the way educational and cultural institutions remember the past, and how they support social equality now.

Universities such as Georgetown, Yale and Harvard in the US, and Glasgow, Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, are already looking at how they benefited from the labour of enslaved people. It is crucial, however, that the University of Bristols approach is different, because the history of the city is so different.

Academic research into Bristols involvement in enslavement started nearly four decades ago. It has taken a long time for those findings to reach a broader audience, but now, thanks to a growing demand for more inclusive narratives of the past that reflect the diversity of the nation, they will. Students and activists, within and outside these universities, have played a huge role in persuading institutions to look at stories of subjugation of human beings in their histories.

These debates are linked to broader, important discussions about colonialism and the legacies of the past. I often hear that slavery and colonialism led to vibrant, culturally diverse societies. It is certainly not what colonisers and slave traders were hoping to achieve when they funded vessels to sail the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, though diversity has indeed been one result. Our celebrated, culturally diverse societies are, however, rigged with racism, social inequalities and discrimination.

Protest about those legacies and the representation of that past have increased in recent years. We have seen demonstrations about the Confederate flag in the US, and the Rhodes Must Fall movement, both in South Africa and Oxford. Embedded in the history of enslavement are economic, social, cultural, political and ideological ideas that shape the way we represent the past. Countries, cities and communities all reshape their own urban and rural landscapes in different ways to tell their stories and showcase their histories and identities.

These campaigns have challenged the way we memorialise a past that is the source of intergenerational trauma what the scholar Marianne Hirsch called post-memory.

The important question now is: what should societies, cities and institutions do to address the impact of slavery a history that has led to such trauma and division? These questions are part of Bristols broader response to its past, and the answer, as I see it, involves a conversation about reparations or reparative justice.

My plan in Bristol is to start by looking at donors who funded the university. The university was created in 1909, long after the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and the abolition of slavery (1833). The University College was set up in 1876, and from the very beginning it received the support of an educator called John Percival, who sought financial support among his circle.

Lewis Fry, a businessman from a prominent anti-slavery family, got on board in 1906. Two years later, donations were made by the Wills family, who made their fortune in various trading ventures, including tobacco produced by enslaved people in North America. Soon after that, the Merchant Venturers College agreed to fund the new engineering faculty. The Merchant Venturers was a guild whose members traded extensively in what was called the African trade. That trade funded slave voyages, bought and sold African captives, invested in plantations and so on.

I suspect there are a number of small businesses and individuals who also gave a helping hand through various donations. I want to find out who they were and how much they donated. If possible, I want to know where that money went and what other investments were made with those funds.

This is about the university but also about the city as a whole, and it will be very important to share my research every step of the way with various communities. The African Caribbean community is central, and I will talk to them about what is learned as we go along, working together to see how we can use the findings to teach that history at various levels. We must also look at the contribution of people of African descent. Their ancestors labours produced wealth that enriched the city, including the university.

I want to be part of this new episode in the history of the city for several reasons. I have been working on the history of Bristol for nearly two decades, and I have made comparative studies between Bristol and other European cities. I have looked at questions of memory, memorialisation and colonial legacies on both sides of the Atlantic. Bristol has gone through incredible changes since the 1990s. It is important that we continue to challenge urban representations of the past, and reinvent the way we look at the memory of enslavement, for example through guerrilla arts and graffiti.

The passion that African-Caribbean communities have put into telling their stories for decades is impressive. From the work done by the Malcolm X Elders, the Kuumba Project, and the Black South West Network to Michael Jenkins work in film revealing the untold stories of Bristolians, Michele Curtiss celebratory Seven Saints of St Pauls murals and the poignant art installation, CARGO, by Lawrence Hoo, Bristolians have found wonderful ways to tell the stories of changes within the city.

These stories need to be embedded in the timeline of the history of the city. It is happening now and it says something profound about where the city is heading. We are working towards social justice. We must also use the narratives, methods and material of that community and other community groups to rethink the way we teach history. The Centre for Black Humanities at the University of Bristol, the first of its kind in the south-west, is the ideal place to bring this work together.

The centre is one of many reasons I wanted to work on this project. The other important reason is the University of Bristols commitment to relocalising teaching and learning to a campus that will be located close to underprivileged communities. This is an opportunity that will allow those communities better access to higher education.

There will be challenges, but those are part of the healing process. A citys memory is truly collective when each community has found ways to acknowledge the past and address the social inequalities created by it. What is happening now in Bristol is truly inspirational. Its history in the making.

Olivette Otele is a professor of the history of slavery at the University of Bristol

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We need to talk about slaverys impact on all of us - The Guardian