About me

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and an Official Fellow in Human, Social, and Political Sciences at Sidney Sussex College. I have held visiting fellowships at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Centre, Centre for European Studies, and Hutchins Centre for African and African American research. I am currently co-editor-in-chief at Sociology Compass, and the British Journal of Sociology, and I am on the editorial board of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

My work bridges critical race and postcolonial theory in order to excavate the historical and transnational dimensions of racism and racialization. Consequently, my expertise lies in the sociology of race, postcolonial sociology, historical sociology, and sociological theory.

I have recently concluded a research project entitled ‘Du Boisian sociology beyond Du Bois’ funded by the Isaac Newton Trust and Cambridge School for Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, which is now contracted to be published with Princeton University Press. This project involved detailed archival research on five Black theorists who I contend can be read as ‘Du Boisians’: W.E.B. Du Bois, Franklin Frazier, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida Wells-Barnett, and John Gibbs St Clair Drake. My book project details how each of these thinkers developed a sociological tradition critical of race and empire which has been overlooked by contemporary sociologists and social scientists. I am currently developing this research into a book project, tentatively titled ‘Du Boisian sociology after Du Bois: experiments in theorizing the global colorline’. I believe that this book will increase our precision of understanding what the Du Boisian tradition entails, highlight the multiple members of the Du Boisian tradition who are regularly misrepresented as being micro-ethnographers of Black America, and highlight the porous boundaries between political activism and professional sociology in the 20th century.

Connected to this Du Boisian project, I have recently secured funding for the British Academy to begin a new research project on the de-Americanization of the Pan-African movement. While American anti-racist and Black feminist organizations played a crucial role in organising the first Pan-African congresses in the 20th century, by the time Kwame Nkrumah organised the All-African People’s Party Congress in 1958, he declared that Americans were now only ‘auxiliary’ members in this movement. Despite the de-Americanisation of the Pan-African movement, it has yet to be properly researched, this has created a gap in our knowledge of the internal and external factors that led to a potential fissure between American anti-racism and African decolonization. My research project here seeks to therefore use Pan-Africanism as a case study for examining the wider field of anti-racism and anti-colonialism, testing the collaborations and fractures between these movements.

Alongside my projects, I have co-founded a research lab titled Catalysts for Decolonization, funded by the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.