Staff profile

Affiliation | Room number | Telephone |
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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
Publications
Authored book
- Williams, Theo (2022). Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation. Verso.
Book review
Journal Article
- Williams, Theo (2021). Collective Security or Colonial Revolution? The 1938 Conference on Peace and Empire, Anticolonialism, and the Popular Front. Twentieth Century British History 32(3): 325-349.
- Williams, Theo (2019). George Padmore and the Soviet Model of the British Commonwealth. Modern Intellectual History 16(02): 531-559.