Dr Imaobong Umoren

Dr Imaobong Umoren

Associate Professor

Department of International History

Room No
SAR.G.04
Languages
English
Key Expertise
Race and Gender in the Caribbean

About me

*on maternity leave 2022-2023*

Dr Imaobong Umoren's research interests, publications, and teaching focus on histories of race, gender, activism and political thought in the Caribbean, Britain and the US focusing on the modern and contemporary period. Dr Umoren's first book Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (University of California Press) won the 2019 Women’s History Network Book Prize. Dr Umoren's research has been supported by numerous bodies including the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Library of Congress, the British Academy, the US-UK Fulbright Commission and the Leverhulme Trust.

She is currently at work on two new book projects. The first is a trade book exploring the long interconnected relationship between Britain and the Caribbean tentatively titled Empire Without End: A History of Britain and the Caribbean which received the 2020-2021 British Library Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer's Award. The second is a political biography of Eugenia Charles, the former prime minister of Dominica.

Dr Umoren studied at King's College London and the University of Oxford, serving as a postdoctoral fellow at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and Pembroke College before taking up her post at the LSE in 2017.

In 2017-2018 and 2019-2020, Dr Umoren received the LSE Excellence in Education Award.

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, Britain and the US, and the history of political ideas.

 

Other titles: Coordinator of MSc Dissertations (HY498/HY499)

Expertise Details

Race and Gender in the Caribbean; 19th and 20th Century Wider African Diaspora

Teaching & supervision

Dr Imaobong Umoren usually teaches the following courses in the Department:

At undergraduate level:

HY246: The Global Caribbean: Colonialism, Race and Revolutions 1780s-1980s

Watch Dr Imaobong Umoren talk about her courses, how they are structured and how students can benefit from taking them in order to better understand the world we live in today.

 

Publications

Books

News & media

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

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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

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Leverhulme Research Fellowship

Awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 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.

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Race Women Internationalists shortlisted for prize

Dr Umoren's Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom was shortlisted for a Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by 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.

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BBC Radio 3 Programme Essays

On 5 November, contributed to one of the episodes of the latest run of BBC Radio 3 Essays, "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).

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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.

UmorenFakeFortuneBBC1

Watch the episode free on BBC iPlayer (UK residents only).

My research