Chancellor

Laura Trevelyan (PGDip 1991, Hon 2022)

Laura Trevelyan is a British American journalist and leading advocate for the Caribbean’s reparatory justice agenda.

Laura enjoyed a 30-year BBC career reporting from all over the UK and the world. She witnessed history unfold, reporting live from Belfast as Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement was negotiated in 1998, from the Trump HQ on election night in 2016, and from the steps of the US Capitol during riots on January 6th 2021.

She also reported from the eye of a hurricane, on the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, from refugee camps in Darfur, and on UK, US and Brazilian elections.

Before leaving the BBC, Laura went on a historic trip to Grenada in February 2023 where the Trevelyans’ publicly apologised to the Grenadian people for the role of their ancestors in enslaving Africans on the island.

Laura delivered the inaugural Sir Tom Hopkinson lecture in March 2024 where she called on the British government and its leading research institutions to make a financial commitment to preserve endangered archives in the Caribbean.

She is a co-founder of Heirs of Slavery, a group of British people whose ancestors profited from the enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean. Heirs of Slavery is encouraging other families with similar histories to acknowledge this fraught past, and calling on Britain’s government to engage in reparatory justice talks with Caribbean governments. She is participating in UNESCO’s first dialogue for reparatory justice.

Born in London, Laura has a first-class honours degree in politics from Bristol University and a post-graduate diploma in newspaper journalism from Cardiff University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband James Goldston (PGDip 1991, Hon 2019), former president of ABC News and now President of Candle True Stories, a global documentary company. Laura and James met while learning their journalistic trade at Cardiff. The couple has three grown-up sons.

Laura is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee of the Gladstone Library in Wales. She’s the author of two books, A Very British Family; The Trevelyans and their World, and The Winchester; An American Dynasty.