Hello! I'm a historian of Africa, empire, and world history explored through imperialism, colonialism and inequality. Timewise, I cover the precolonial to the contemporary. My last book Women of the Somali Diaspora: Refugees, Rebuilding and Resilience (Hurst, 2021) was inspired by my brilliant Somali undergraduate women students. Currently I am also hugely honoured to be Director for the Centre for Women, Peace and Security.
My favourite book I wrote is Empire of Sentiment (Cambridge University Press, 2018) because of its range of sources and my research adventures in south-central Africa. Book of the week in the Times Higher Education and praised in Times Literary Supplement for its “muscular scholarship”, it was the first history of modern empire using emotion. It traced the enduring cultural impact of ideas about race, exploration, masculinity, and heroic failure, including the role of Africans in the making of this mythscape. Previously, I have researched and written on colonial governance in Africa, chieftaincies, and the violence of the Mau Mau rebellion. Being Welsh (and increasingly annoyed), I have a growing interest in the long history of England’s first colony.
Reflecting my professional home in the world’s leading social science university, I also take a multi-disciplinary approach and apply historical research to the present, with my research on the impact of COVID on a minoritised community in London. A love of history also intersects with a lifelong commitment to feminism and my current research for women, peace and security focuses on women in leadership in some of the world’s most hostile spaces for that.
After gaining a first class degree in Social and Political Science with History and Philosophy from Bath University, I won a scholarship from West Glamorgan County Council for graduates who were the first generation to go to University to read for a Master’s Degree in the History of International Relations in the History Faculty, University of Cambridge. I then won an ESRC Doctoral Fellowship for my doctoral research on colonial Kenya (supervised by Prof John Lonsdale, Emeritus, Trinity College), then a four-year Research and Teaching Fellowship at Churchill College and the African Studies Centre, Cambridge University. I then held lectureships at Durham, SOAS and Cambridge University and have been Director of Studies in History at Churchill and Corpus Christi. I have won numerous student awards for teaching and in 2016 was runner up the LSE student award for LSEs most dynamic lecturer.
I came to LSE in 2004 to help set up the first Master’s degree in Empires, Imperialism and Colonialism in the UK, and to establish the Department’s first course in the history of the British Empire and in African history.
I have an active interest in the history of journalism and in creative writing. In 2025 I am running the first PhD Writing Workshop following the award of an LSE Summer of Research Culture grant, which will include well-being and neuro-diversity, both causes close to my heart. In my spare time I write a monthly newspaper column, with a focus on pressing issues such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, and my dachshunds. I have recently finished writing a 80,000 word novel. It’s comedy about class, set in a fictitious Oxbridge college, Manville, the book’s title (yet unpublished and un-Netflixed…)
I have successfully supervised many doctoral students over my career which has been huge fun. Topics have included the European 'scramble for Africa', a the life and times of black activist and intellectual George Padmore, the impact of British rule on the evolution of international women's rights at the UN, African and 'coloured’ soldiers in the Second World War, French Algerian rap music, and race and politics in Bermuda and the 'French' Caribbean. In line with my own lifelong passion for music, I am excited to currently also have student a specialising in the history of resistance, politics and music; also on the reproduction of Indian caste and inequality in South Africa; politics, memory and trauma in Zimbabwe, central Africa; and the role of youth in one of the longest rebel movements in Uganda.
I welcome research enquiries at all levels, especially in the field of women’s history, peace-making, music, misogyny, combatting GBV, Welsh-imperial history, nineteenth century Victorian Britain and the history of animal-human relations.
Expertise
Modern Africa History
Publications
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Teaching
Teaching
Professor Joanna Lewis holds an LSE Teaching Prize; was a two-time nominee in the LSE Student Led Teaching Excellent Awards (2014-15 and 2015-16) and 2016-17’s runner up the category of most dynamic lecturer.
She usually teaches the following courses on the British Empire and Africa in the department:
Professor Joanna Lewis supervises large numbers of students in UG dissertations (HY300) and Master’s thesis (HY498/HY499) research on topics that range from masculinity, empire and the public schools; late nineteenth century explorers in Tibet; FGM; Ian Smith and UDI; family law in Cote D’Ivoire post-independence; global protest and the student anti-apartheid movement; African and Indian Slavery; Mugabe and African violence; to King Leopold and the Scramble for Africa.
Supervision
Professor Joanna Lewis supervises large numbers of students in UG dissertations (HY300) and Master’s thesis (HY498/HY499) research on topics that range from masculinity, empire and the public schools; late nineteenth century explorers in Tibet; FGM; Ian Smith and UDI; family law in Cote D’Ivoire post-independence; global protest and the student anti-apartheid movement; African and Indian Slavery; Mugabe and African violence; to King Leopold and the Scramble for Africa.
She currently supervises the following PhD students:
Research student
Provisional thesis title
Isa Egiri
Rebels without a Pause: Youth, Generation, and Cycles of Guerrilla Violence in the Rwenzori Borderland of Uganda and Congo, 1960s to Present Day
"This is Zambia, a land of W.I.T.C.H": The Zamrock movement, identity, social change and transnational countercultures in independent Zambia in the long seventies.
Austin Swift
Decolonization and Collective Memory in Central Africa: Case Studies from Gabon and the Republic of the Congo, 1960-91.
Malaika Newsome-Magadza
A history of ZANLA operatives in Africa, China and the Eastern Block, 1963-80: imagining Home and Nation in exile.
She supervised the following PhD students in the past:
Non-Sovereign States in the era of Decolonization: Politics, Nationalism, and Assimilation in French and British Caribbean Territories, 1945-80
Student Testimonial
BA Alumna (2008) Shalina Patel was interviewed by the BBC in late June 2020 about how black history is taught in schools. Her experience taking Professor Joanna Lewis’s courses on race, violence and colonial rule in the British Empire, and subsequent experience having her as a dissertation supervisor, has had a profound effect on the way she teaches history. Professor Lewis says of Shalina: she "was an outstanding undergraduate and chose to do her dissertation on the empire and imperial issues featured in extra-curriculum school activities in three elite British public schools in the late Victorian period. It would make for great reading now especially." From this experience, Shalina has started an Instagram account (The History Corridor) to help teach people about the British Empire and other aspects of history that are typically skipped over, or told from only one perspective. Her first experience with histories that weren’t white-washed was in the HY113 and HY240 courses she took with Dr Lewis during her BA.
Engagement and impact
General
Joanna supports freedom of speech and journalism in a number of ways, commenting on popular cultural issues such as the monarchy and on current affairs in Africa. She also has a personal column in her local newspaper, the Hampshire Chronicle.
She is a regular book reviewer for the Times Higher Education magazine including:
In July, Prof Joanna Lewis, hosted a two day work shop designed to support PhD students grappling with the myriad challenges of writing up and completing their research, whilst planning next steps.
Funded by the LSE Summer of Research Culture Fund, experts from across the School ran seminars and gave talks on areas including presenting work for a non-academic audience, well-being and post-doc applications. Dr Pete Mills, Head of the PhD Academy and Catherine Reynolds, Careers both made guest appearances. Space was also allocated for writing tasks. In addition to a strong presence from IH, eight other LSE Departments were represented.
Feedback has been extremely positive, and the Department and PhD Academy will be looking to run something similar next year!
2021
Research for the World
Dr Lewis wrote an article for LSE’s online research magazine, Research for the World. As part of their Race Equity issue, she contributed a piece on her new bookwhich explores the lives of the Somali women who arrived in Britain fleeing war, and their resilience in overcoming the barriers facing them as refugees in post-Imperial Britain. Read it here
Women of the Somali Diaspora(Hurst Publishers) recounts and analyses the stories of Somali women who survived genocide and refugee camps to arrive in London, helping us to understand their personal histories, a collective history of refugees as rebuilders, and the forgotten history and hidden legacies of Britain’s colonial past. Read more
Postdoctoral fellowship success for two former PhD students supervised by Dr Joanna Lewis
Dr Caroline Green, currently an LSE Fellow with us has won one of the LSE's seven ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowships. She will extend her research on the international history of women's rights, Britain, and the end of Empire. At the same time, Dr Grace Carringtonhas become part of a postdoctoral research team funded by the AHRC, based at Royal Holloway, which has won funding for "The Visible Crown: Queen Elizabeth II and the Caribbean, 1952 to the present". Dr Carrington will be building on her doctoral thesis on Decolonisation and Independence in the Caribbean.
TIME Magazine
Dr Joanna Lewis recently talked with TIME Magazine about the Monarchy’s troubled relationship with race in the aftermath of Meghan and Harry’s interview with Oprah (10 March). She commented, "if we look to history, we can see how the royals have a complex relationship with people of color, because throughout the last decades, it’s visits to the Commonwealth where the monarchy has felt most popular, and most loved". Read the article here.
Dr Lewis won a British Academy 2020 Special Research Award Grant: Covid-19 Scheme to set up a small team to explore high death rates among Somali communities in some of the poorest parts of London. The project entitled, "A Study of Caabuga-Corona in the Somali Diaspora: Histories of COVID-19, Male Elders and Community Responses in Tower Hamlets and the East End of London", was selected out of 842 eligible applications with a success rate of 6.6%. Dr Lewis was awarded close to the maximum on offer (£10,000). Read more about the scheme.
THE Book Review
Another book review by Dr Lewis was published in the 16 January issue of the Times Higher Education. She offered her comments on Licentious Worlds: Sex and Exploitation in Global Empiresby Julie Peakman, a panoramic study of sexual behaviour and attempts to control it across five centuries of globalising empires. Find out what Dr Lewis had to say about this new release.
2019
Channel 4 documentary
Dr Lewis was featured as an expert in the first two episodes of Channel 4's documentary The Queen’s Lost Family. Using never-before-seen personal letters, diaries and photograph albums, the documentary tells the inside story of the royal family over three turbulent decades from the 1920s to the end of World War Two. First episode was aired on Sunday, 11 August, and the second episode followed one week later.
2018
THE book review
Dr Joanna Lewis reviewed Jeffrey A. Auerbach's Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empirefor the Times Higher Education on 29 November. She argues that his fascinating study takes boredom to a new level. Auerbach maintains that a unifying feature of the British Empire was the prolonged experience of being bored. So bored had the British become, he insists, it even laid "the emotional foundations for the British to leave their empire in the twentieth [century]". Read the review.
LSE Research Showcase
The first LSE Research Showcaseorganised by Knowledge Exchange for the School community was held on 13 November and featured exhibits with film and photography, hands-on activities and games. One of 14 stands, Dr Joanna Lewis's research was featured in the exhibition. She presented her research with Dr Shane Marotta and Mohammed Ismail, on a contemporary case study in human resilience during and after the Somali civil war in 1991, "Rebuilding Somaliland After Conflict: The role of a London diaspora".
Outreach lecture at Somali Cultural Festival
As part of the Somali Cultural Festival, Dr Joanna Lewis gave a public lecture on Monday, 22 October, at the Anglo-Somali Society. The lecture, entitled "Somali Women, the Diaspora and Resilience", was based on Dr Lewis’s current research project at LSE funded by the Institute of Global Affairs. She talked about how Somali refugees, forced to flee conflict after 1990, survived the trauma of dislocation, rebuilt or remade new lives in London and then turned their attention to helping the homeland.
British Academy-funded workshop in South Africa
Dr Joanna Lewis presented at a British Academy-funded international workshop in South Africa on 11 October. The workshop, "Connecting the Local and the Global in Nineteenth Century Southern Africa" took place between 9 and 11 October and was jointly hosted by the International Studies Group, University of the Free State, and the University of Dundee in Scotland. Dr Lewis delivered one of the keynote lectures, entitled "The Pathetic Death of Bwana Ingeleshi: Late 19th Century British Imperialisms in South-Central Africa and the Graveyard of Ambition". The lecture was based on two chapters in her recently released monograph Empire of Sentimenton the death and myth of David Livingstone.
Africa at LSE Blog
As a new exhibition commemorating the Somali effort during the First World War opened in London, Dr Joanna Lewis contributed a new article to the Africa at LSE Blog, analysing how scholarship of the Great War is increasingly encompassing the global contribution of the conflict. Read the article, "Somalis in the First World War".
Fieldwork in Somaliland
Dr Joanna Lewis left the UK on Friday, 20 July, to conduct research in Somaliland for her project on the reconstruction of post conflict states. In 2017, she was awarded an LSE Institute of Global Affairs-Rockefeller Grant for two years to lead a project on Somalia, entitled "‘" The project, based at the Firoz Lalji LSE Centre for Africa, investigates the role of the Somali diaspora in building frameworks of social, political and financial resilience in a post-conflict urban environment. It case-studies the diasporic relationship between London and Hargeisa, capital of the unrecognised state of Somaliland, since civil war ended in 1991. As part of her research, Dr Lewis will interview Somaliland's Foreign Minister Dr Edna Adan in the Horn of Africa. Incidentally, Dr Adan and the issue of Somaliland’s status are discussed in an article in the Guardianon 20 July.
Empire of Sentiment - Book of the Week
Empire of Sentiment: The Death of Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialismwas proclaimed Book of the Week by The Times Higher Education(22 March). Joanna Bourke reviews the manuscript while giving an account of Dr Lewis’s analysis of Livingstone’s mythologised death, as well as Livingstone’s legacy in post-imperial contexts. "Her new book on the ‘myth of imperialism’", Bourke argues, "is an enthralling analysis of the cult of Livingstone". Read the full review in the THEwebsite.
New book released by CUP
Dr Lewis’s new book, Empire of Sentiment: The Death of Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialism,was released by Cambridge University Press in January 2018. The book argues that one singular moment, the death of David Livingstone, shaped Britain’s perception of itself as a humane power overseas when the colonial reality fell far short. The images and myths surrounding Livingstone’s death were passed down through generations, inspiring waves of sentimental feeling and further colonial rule in Africa. Order the book on Amazon UK. Watch the promo trailed for the book on Vimeo.
2017
Public lecture at Yale University
Dr Joanna Lewis was at Yale University on 12 October to talk about how she wrote her forthcoming book, Empire of Sentiment: The Death of Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialism. Her public lecture, entitled "Death, Iconicity and Emotion: (the journey) to Livingstone, Africa and an Empire of Sentiment", is part of the International History Workshop series, sponsored by the History Department and the Council of African Studies. Dr Lewis's book, to be released by Cambridge University Press in January 2018, is the first emotional history of the British Empire. It explores how David Livingstone's death tied together British imperialism and Victorian humanitarianism and inserted it into popular culture.
Career promotion
Dr Joanna Lewis was officially promoted to Associate Professor on 1 August 2017.
BBC Four's A Timewatch Guide
Dr Joanna Lewis participated in an episode of BBC Four’s A Timewatch Guide, called Dictators and Despots, showed on 25 July. Through the examination of fifty years of BBC documentary archives, the episode looked at how dictators, such as Cesar, Castro Gaddafi, Saddam and Mugabe, have risen in unsettling times and why they can have such a powerful appeal. Watch it on BBC iPlayer(UK only).
Award winner of IGA-Rockefeller Grant
Dr Joanna Lewis was awarded an LSE Institute of Global Affairs-Rockefeller Grantfor two years to lead a project on Somalia, entitled "‘Pathways to Resilience’: The Role of an Urban Diaspora in Post-Conflict Reconstruction, London and Hargeisa, 1991 to the Present Day." The project will be based at the Firoz Lalji LSE Centre for Africa.
Review of Keith Somerville's Ivoryfor the the Africa at LSE Blog
Dr Joanna Lewis contributed a passionate and analytical review of BBC broadcaster Keith Somerville’s newest book, Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africafor the Africa at LSEblog (27 January 2017). Dr Lewis describes Somerville’s book as the best academic account to date of the history of the supply side of ivory trade. "He argues, that it is more the petty, everyday reality of corruption, crime and politics, which enables illegal poaching to survive (and even surge) when there is any kind of international push for a more extensive ban on the trade. The logic then is that hunting and therefore the trade should be regulated." Dr Lewis, herself a passionate animal lover, concedes that "when the argument comes from Somerville, the heart has to yield to the head". "Supporting and strengthening communities so they can manage wildlife responsibly from the bottom up, with some controlled hunting, is an argument that many wildlife experts have come to see is the only long term viable solution." "Still", concludes Dr Lewis, "what a deterrent it could be that, if caught, those men who organise the hunting and butchering of elephants for pleasure and for their tusks, also have something they hold dear cut off…" Read Dr Joanna Lewis’s full reviewof Ivory.
Review of Martin Plaut's Understanding Eritreafor the Times Higher Education
Dr Joanna Lewis reviewed Matin Plaut’s newest book, Understanding Eritrea: Inside Africa’s Most Repressive State, in the Times Higher Education (26 January 2017). "Plaut’s extensive evidence shows how the regime’s repressive stance in power is a consequence of its ruler," writes Dr Lewis. "A study of the North African country lays bare a ruler at war with his own people". Read Dr Joanna Lewis’s review.
2016
Review of Hansen's Al-Shabaab in Somaliafor the "Africa at LSE" blog
Dr Joanna Lewis, our expert in Modern Africa History, contributed a book review to the Africa at LSE blogon 28 October 2016. She reviewed the revised and updated version of Stig Jarle Hansen’s Al Shabaab in Somalia: The History and Ideology of a Militant Islamist Group, recently released with a new preface. Dr Joanna Lewis praises the volume for providing a comprehensive history of the militant Islamist group. Read her full review.
Times Higher EducationSummer reads
Alongside other members of the higher education community, Dr Joanna Lewis told the readers of the Times Higher Education(14 July 2016) about two books she planned to take on holiday - a new must-read and a classic worthy of a second look. Read her suggestions.
On Benedict Anderson's Final Book in The Times Higher Education
Dr Joanna Lewis wrote a feature on Benedict Anderson’s last and final book, A Life Beyond Boundaries, for the The Times Higher Educationon 2 June 2016. Dr Lewis’s review provides insight into Anderson’s most famous book, Imagined Communities, and his latest intellectual memoir, completed months before his death in December 2015. Read Dr Lewis's opinionon nationalism’s truest friend and the books that made him a world authority.
'Highly Commended' for a LSESU Teaching Excellence Award
In May 2016, Dr Joanna Lewis was shortlisted for the Student Union LSE Teaching Excellence Award in the category of Innovative Teaching, for which she was ‘highly commended’. She already holds an LSE Teaching Prize from a previous year, and last year she was also nominated for an award. The Teaching Excellence Awards are the only awards at LSE that are student-led - students make the nominations and students choose the winners. It is the students who know the teachers that really make a difference.
Introduction to academia inTimes Higher Education
Dr Joanna Lewis, our specialist in African and Imperial History, was featured in an article published in the Times Higher Educationon 14 April. She is one of several scholars around the world recommending ‘essential’ texts to introduce sixth-formers to the academy. Her choice is Owen Jones’s The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It(2014). Learn why.
International History student in Row Zambezi Expedition 2011
Dr Lewis has written a short essay in support of the Row Zambezi Expedition 2011. A charity event, designed to raise money for Water Aid, it is being organised by a second year History student, Oliver Cook. Dr Lewis was happy to be able to support this event following Livingstone's journey down the river, and she looks forward to seeing the team at the finishing line near Victoria Falls in the summer.
