Staff profile

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

Authored book

• Williams, Theo (2022). Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation. Verso.

Book review

• Williams, Theo (2022). The Many Faces of Pan-Africanism. African Studies Review 65(2): 504-520.

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.