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Overview

Dr Theo Williams

Lecturer (Modern British History)


Affiliations
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Lecturer (Modern British History) in the Department of History  

Biography

I am a historian of modern Britain, with particular expertise in the histories of race, political thought, and colonialism and anti-colonialism. I am especially interested in the ways in which the transnational movements of people and ideas have had an impact on political culture in Britain. I completed my PhD at King's College London in 2019, before joining the Department of History at Durham in 2020.

My first monograph, Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation, examines Black radical politics in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s. The book makes the case that the Pan-Africanist ideas promoted by Black activists significantly reconfigured the politics of the wider British socialist movement in this period. I am currently working on a second major project, which is about anti-colonialism in postwar Britain.

Research interests
  • Modern British history
  • Black British history
  • Black radical thought and movements
  • Imperialism and anti-imperialism
  • Socialist and Marxist thought and movements