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About the author:

Dr Samia Khatun is a feminist historian of the British Empire, focussing on the life worlds and experiences of colonised peoples. Tackling the central role of the discipline of modern history in constructing myths of the superiority of white man, Khatun’s research and writing develops methodologies for analysing intersecting gender, race and class oppressions by engaging colonised peoples’ intellectual traditions. In doing so Khatun takes aim at a racist assumption that profoundly shapes contemporary scholarship about Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas: The claim that the knowledge traditions of Enlightened man have superseded the epistemologies of peoples colonised by European empires.

Khatun was Associate Professor at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), where she was developing one of the first undergraduate history programs in the burgeoning private university sector in Bangladesh. Prior to this role, Khatun was a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne and have held visiting research positions at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin), the University of Otago (Dunedin) and Jadavpur University (Kolkata). Khatun’s documentaries on Muslim migration, race relations and white nationalism have screened on Australian national broadcasters ABC-TV and SBS-TV and her first monograph Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia was published in December 2018.

She has recently been appointed as Director for the Centre for Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of London.

About the host:

Talha Ahsan is currently a PhD student at SOAS on medieval scholasticism. He runs the Abbasid History Podcast. More on his work at talhaahsan.com.