Research Interests

My interests are focused on historical and cultural geographies of the black presence in Britain (particularly London), Victorian theories of race and anti-racism and the links between contemporary identity and the diverse histories of London.

The Black presence in Victorian London  To date my research has focused upon Black women and their experiences in four arenas of Victorian life: institutions, imperial elite society, work and anti-racist politics.  I am now working to recover biographies of Black Victorian men and integrate these into a new historical geography of London.

Historical geographies of Anti-Caste  Edited and distributed by Catherine Impey, Anti-Caste was a journal of early forms of anti-racist/race prejudice literature in Britain. First published in March 1888, Impey eventually oversaw the transfer of Anti-Caste the journal to a Society for the Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man, and passed the editorship of its newly named journal Fraternity to the Dominican born Celestine Edwards in 1893.  The following year Edwards died and Impey began to republish her own journal once again, but she only managed to publish three issues, before, for some reason, she fell silent. My current research focuses upon the geographical imagination of Impey's writings in Anti-Caste, as well as the geography of Anti-Caste's readership and its place in the history of the anti-racist movement in Britain.

Looking for Blackness: race, representation and photography  The absence of so-called racial or ethnic descriptions in British national records such as the census means there is no way to tell how many black men and women walked the streets of our cities, towns and villages, and slip past our eyes and through our fingers because we cannot see them in printed texts. So, as well as attempting to reconstruct the biographies of individual black men and women, I am interested in the theoretical issues raised from using photographs in the research of black history.

Public history and urban landscapes I am also interested in the representation of black history in London’s urban landscape and the relationship between British identity, public history and the place of black history within urban and rural landscapes.