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Joanna Newman MBE, FRSA, is Provost at SOAS University of London, and was previously the first female Secretary General of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU), an international network of 500 universities.

Joanna will be contributing to the teaching of the following modules at SOAS in 2025–2026: Empire and Education: Colonial Legacies in Research, Thematic Approaches to History UG, World Histories – Global Connectvities, The Holocaust and the Problem of Evil, Violence in History. She continues to teach on the MA in transnational history at King’s College London.

Prior to joining the ACU, Joanna was Vice-Principal (international) of King’s College London. Her previous positions include director of Universities UK International and head of higher education at the British Library.

Joanna is a faculty member in the Department of History, at SOAS, University of London, a Senior Research Fellow in History at King’s College London, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, specialising in the history of antisemitism, the Holocaust, migration, transnational history, refugee studies and Caribbean history.

She was awarded a Parkes PhD Studentship at the University of Southampton, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. Her most recent publication is Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933-1945, Berghahn, Oxford and NY, 2019.

Joanna has been a strong voice in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in international higher education and championing at intergovernmental  levels the case for equitable access to higher education.

She is also a member of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s Leadership Council, and a member of the High-level Advisory Group for Mission 4.7, a new initiative to accelerate policy and research efforts on education for sustainable development. She is a board member of the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA) and Advance HE.