Dr Arun Sood is Lecturer in English at The University of Plymouth who works across Memory Studies, Romanticism, and Postcolonial literatures. He is the author of Robert Burns and The United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory, c. 1786-1866, and is currently developing a new project on Global Romanticisms.

In June 2020, a statue of Edward Colston, the seventeenth-century transatlantic slave trader, was forcibly removed from the centre of Bristol prompting widespread debate about statues and commemorative symbols across Britain's towns and cities. In this podcast, Dr Arun Sood discusses how does academic scholarship on memory, race, and nationhood can help us to understand this event and its wider repercussions in the wake of Black Lives Matter.