NACBS Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship

2024

Olivia Wyatt (Queen Mary University of London)

• Wyatt is a PhD researcher in History at Queen Mary University of London. Wyatt completed a MA with Distinction in Race and Resistance at the University of Leeds before moving on to Queen Mary for the PhD. Wyatt has a remarkable record of contributions to diversity within the field of British Studies and service to the communities with whom she works. That record stretches back to Wyatt’s participation in Young Historians Project and role in co-founding From Margins to Centre, the first nationwide undergraduate conference on marginalized histories, at the University of York. While at Leeds, Wyatt conducted an oral history project on Caribbean women’s community activism in the city and, with Historic England, organized a 50th-anniversary event for the Leeds Caribbean and African Centre. Wyatt already has produced important scholarship based on these interviews and community archives. Wyatt’s MA dissertation won the Women’s History Network’s prize in 2022, and Wyatt contributed a chapter on Caribbean women’s community activism in Leeds to Many Struggles: New Histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain, edited by Hakim Adi. Wyatt has also contributed to History Today and History Matters as well as a number of public-facing events and BBC Radio broadcasts, and co-organized a recent conference on Black British history at the Institute of Historical Research. Wyatt’s PhD research centers on the politics of complexion and the survival of colorism among Black Britons across the twentieth century. Wyatt has expanded the scope of their previous research in Leeds and is conducting oral history interviews in Britain’s neglected second cities—Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, Cardiff—for the project. With the support of the NACBS DI Fellowship, Wyatt will complete these interviews and will spend part of 2025 as a fellow of the St Augustine Department of History at the University of the West Indies in order to conduct research and share their work with local scholars and community members. Wyatt is producing scholarship that deepens and nuances our understanding the history of Black Britain and its diasporic connections, and exemplifies what it means to be a community-engaged historian in their research practice and dissemination of their research.

There were two Honorable Mentions:

Frankie Chapell (University College, London)

• Frankie Chappell is a PhD researcher at Institute of the Americas at University College London, and previously completed a MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation at the London School of Economics. Chappell participated in the “African Women and the British Health Service” project of the Young Historians Project, and has contributed to History Matters and the blogs of the Women’s History Network, Royal Society, History Workshop, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Chappell has also made significant contributions to the collection, preservation, and accessibility of historical materials related to marginalized communities in Britain. They have delivered workshops for young people of color on squatting movements in Britain, volunteered as transcriber of oral history interviews with individuals from the Black Women’s Movement for the Black Cultural Archives, and currently are a volunteer researcher on the “This is Black Britain project” to produce a publicly-accessible, interactive map of Black British historical figures and groups. Chappell will use the award to support the completion of their PhD thesis. Moving beyond the usual focus on Black and Asian women’s activities in racially-defined spaces and antiracist movements, Chappell’s research centers on contributions by women of colour to peace and environmental movements in Britain, and promises to make an important contribution to the historiography.

Jamey Jesperson (University of Victoria)

• Jamey Jesperson is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Victoria and currently holds a visiting fellowship at the Queer History Centre at Goldsmiths College. Jesperson has received a number of accolades for their groundbreaking research. In 2022, Jesperson received the Royal Historical Society’s Rees Davies Prize for the “best Master’s thesis in the UK,” and subsequently revised the thesis into a journal article on colonial trans misogyny in New Spain that won both the 2023 Gender & History Graduate Student Essay Prize and the 2024 CLGBTH Gregory Sprague Prize for an outstanding article on LGBTQ+ history by a graduate student. Jesperson also coauthored an article (“‘Waking to Dream’: The Life Stories of Saylesh Wesley, Trans Stó:lō Elder-to-Be”) with the scholar and Stó:lō trans woman Saylesh Wesley that was published in Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2023. Jesperson’s PhD thesis build on this previous work and historicizes trans Indigenous lives in the Pacific Northwest during the early contact period. The dissertation “re-narrates ‘contact’” from the perspectives of five trans Indigenous people who lived during the late 18th and 19th centuries. This research, as Jesperson writes, is “grounded by a commitment to articulate ongoing violence against trans women.”

2023

Rochelle Malcolm (Columbia University).

• Rochelle Malcolm’s research on the social and cultural history of Brixton as a site of grassroots activism from 1970 to 2000 broadens our understanding of the wide-ranging cast of participants who helped to shape local community life in London during the latter half of the twentieth century. Her work pays attention to second-generation African and Caribbean Britons, the Asian community and the LGBTQ community who lived and worked in Brixton. Through her research, Malcolm will intentionally build an oral history archive to contribute to the community’s efforts to preserve Brixton's history.

There was one Honorable Mention:

Bright Alozie (Portland State University), “Voices in Ink: Petitions, Petition Writing, and the Colonial State in Igboland, Nigeria.”

• Dr. Alozie’s current book project, a revision of his doctoral dissertation, revolves around hundreds of previously untapped petitions, dubbed “voices in ink,” addressed to British officials by subjects of colonial Igboland, Nigeria. By exploring these understudied sources, he brings together multiple perspectives to engage with petition writing beyond an avenue for registering discontent about colonial rule to include knowledge production and identity construction in colonial Nigeria. “Voices in Ink” prompts us to rethink African colonial studies and British imperialism.

2022

Jade Bentil (Oxford University) “‘We used our place in the world to imagine ourselves differently’: Black Feminist Activism and the Politics of Race, Nation and Empire in Britain, 1968-1988⁠.” 

• Jade Bentil’s research seeks to expand our understanding of Black British women’s contributions to Black feminist history.  Drawing from oral histories conducted with Black women activists, Bentil’s work explores how Black women built autonomous spaces to organize in the service of capacious visions of social justice and Black liberation.  In addition to adding much-needed texture to our understanding of Black women’s lives in Britain during the late twentieth century, Bentil work challenges dominant narratives of feminist organizing in Britain during the late twentieth century and sheds light on the myriad ways that Black women leveraged their marginality in British society to contemplate radical post-imperial futures.

Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship Honorable Mention

Leonard Butingan (UC Santa Cruz) “Black Anti-Racist Activism and the Afterlife of Empire: Britain 1976-2000.”

• Interrogating how activists grappled with the legacies of empire as postcolonial praxis is at the fore of Leonard Butingan’s research.  With a focus on understudied historical actors including Black feminists, queer intellectuals, independent film makers, radical current affairs stars and local grassroots activists, Butingan’s work examines how Black Britons operating across a number of domains understood racism, sexism and homophobia in Britain as part of a neocolonial order and in relation Black transnational liberation movements.  Butingan’s ground-breaking research historicizes Black globality in the late twentieth century and offers critical analysis of the ways that Black activists and intellectuals imagined anti-racism beyond the nation-state.

Jada Gannaway (Michigan State University) “The Political Biography of Althea Jones-Lecointe.”

• With a focus on the life and legacy of Althea Jones-Lecointe, a central figure in the London-based Black Power movement, Jada Gannaway’s study examines the political realities confronting Black communities in Britain during the long 1970s.  Gannaway’s research interrogates how Black Caribbeans like Jones-Lecointe articulated expectations of citizenship and highlights how developments including shifting immigration policies influenced how Black political organizations mobilized in defense of Black rights.  In doing so Gannaway’s project positions Black women activists like Jone-Lecointe as key strategists in shaping campaigns against state violence that confronted a range of range of social issues including police violence, housing and education.