Personal profile

Personal profile

I joined the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway University as a Teaching Fellow in International Relations in 2018 and in September 2020 I took up the position of Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, having been awarded a three-year grant from the Leverhulme Foundation.

 

I completed my PhD at Royal Holloway in 2016 and hold an MA (distinction) in Human Rights from Kingston University and a BA (Hons) from Aberystwyth University.

 

Before coming to Royal Holloway to conduct PhD research, I worked for eight years in further education in Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan and for a number of national- and international-focused NGOs in the UK working on issues of child poverty, homelessness, and gender in development.

 

Research interests

My research explores post-colonial relationships between Britain and African states, and African sexualities. On the area of postcolonial relationships, I have researched and published on the question of why African states remain in the Commonwealth and whether Zimbabwe ought to re-join the organisation.

 

On the area of sexualities, I am particularly interested in the ways in which state and non-state actors attempt to regulate sexualities in Africa and have recently published an article on queer worldmaking in Wanuri Kahiu’s film Rafiki that was banned in Kenya in 2018.

 

My Leverhulme project explores the everyday realities of life for queer people in a number of states in Southern Africa that have decriminalised homosexuality. Studies of sexuality rarely take Africa as their starting point for theorisation. The project intends to subvert conventional studies of sexuality by moving away from western queer theory to listen to, and work with, the everyday experiences of queer African citizens as a starting point for emphasising knowledge production and theory-building from the ground up.