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About
Dr Imaobong Umoren's research interests, publications, and teaching focus on histories of women, gender, activism and political thought in the Caribbean and wider African diaspora in the twentieth century.
Dr Umoren welcomes enquiries from prospective doctoral students on topics related to European colonialism and US imperialism in the Caribbean, race and gender in the modern African diaspora especially the Caribbean and Britain, and the history of political ideas.
Other titles: MSc Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation Programme Director; Chair of MSc Examinations
Expertise
Race and Gender in the Caribbean, 19th and 20th Century Wider African Diaspora
Teaching
Dr Imaobong Umoren usually teaches the following courses in the Department:
Imaobong is currently on sabbatical and is not doing any teaching.
At undergraduate level:
HY246: The Global Caribbean: Colonialism, Race and Revolutions 1780s-1980s
PhD Student Supervision:
- Arianna Parisi (Provisional thesis title: "Prison abolitionism within black feminism in the US.")
Engagement and impact
2025
Watch Dr Imaobong Umoren promote her new book!
Dr Umoren has partnered with the LSE Communications Division to produce a video where she talks in detail about her new book Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean.
Watch the video HERE
The book was released by Penguin on 5 June and will see a book release event on 22 October later this year!
Check out the book HERE
2020
LSE International Studies
Joined the editorial team of the CUP-LSE International Studies book series in December 2020. The series comprises transdisciplinary books that contain an overtly international or transnational dimension and that address pressing contemporary concerns. Read more
Writer's award
Won a major prize for her new book project entitled "Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean". The 2021 Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writers Award comes with a year’s ‘residence’ at the British Library to develop the project further and an opportunity to showcase her work at the Hay Festival. Read more
Leverhulme Research Fellowship
Awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowshipin 2020/21 for her project on Eugenia Charles, the first female Prime Minister in the Anglophone Caribbean and LSE Alumna. The project is entitled "'Iron Lady of the Caribbean': the life and politics of Dame Eugenia Charles".
2019
Book prize for Dr Imaobong Umoren
Recipient of the 2019 Women’s History Network Book Prize for best first book on women and gender history. The judges thought "was an original concept, largely through its intersectional lens - the book is about the history of race, global freedom struggles and transnational history looked at through the perspective of gender". They also said the research was "breathtaking, ranging widely across geographical space – including both the Anglophone and Francophone African diaspora and which used sources in both languages". Read more here.
Race Women Internationalistsshortlisted for prize
Dr Umoren's Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedomwas shortlisted for a Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual Historyby the African American Intellectual History Society. Released in May 2018 with University of California Press, the book explores how a group of Caribbean and African American women in the early and mid-twentieth century traveled the world to fight colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism.
2018
Katrina Honeyman Memorial Lecture at Leeds
Delivered the Katrina Honeyman Memorial Lecture at the University of Leeds on 19 November. Her lecture, "In Search of Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles" explored how a group of Caribbean and African American women in the early and mid-twentieth century travelled the world to fight colonialism, fascism, sexism and racism. Read more.
BBC Radio 3 Programme Essays
On 5 November, contributed to one of the episodes of the latest run of BBC Radio 3Essays, "Minds at War", which explores the impact of the First World War on individual artists through the prism of a single great work. She told the story of W.E.B. Dubois’ ground-breaking editorial, "Returning Soldiers" (1919). Today, Dubois is heralded as the father of African American intellectualism and continues to inspire a generation of new activists who, like him, demand that black lives matter. Catch up with the episode on BBC iPlayer(UK only).
BBC One's "Fake or Fortune"
Appeared in an episode of BBC One’s "Fake or Fortune", entitled "A Double Whodunnit", which aired on 2 September. In the episode, Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould investigate two rare portraits of black British subjects from the 18th and 19th centuries. Painted with extraordinary skill and sophistication, both pictures are highly unusual in their positive depiction of black sitters at a time when Britain was still heavily engaged in slavery. But this is also an intriguing double whodunnit.
Watch the episode free on BBC iPlayer(UK residents only).