Dr Samia Khatun

I am a feminist historian of race relations, focussing on the life worlds and experiences of colonised peoples across the British Empire. Tackling the central role of the discipline of modern history in constructing racial hierarchies and feminist imaginations, my research and writing develops methodologies for analysing gender, race and class oppressions by engaging colonised peoples’ intellectual traditions. My first monograph, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia (2019), took aim at a racist assumption that profoundly shapes contemporary scholarship about Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas: The claim that the knowledge traditions of Enlightened man have superseded the epistemologies of peoples colonised by European empires. Australianama won the Scholarly Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the Educational Publishing Awards Australia and was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, the Multicultural NSW Prize and the Ernest Scott Prize for History.

Before joining SOAS, I was Associate Professor at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), where I was developing one of the first undergraduate history programs in the burgeoning private university sector in Bangladesh. Prior to this role, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne and have held visiting research positions at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin), the University of Otago (Dunedin) and Jadavpur University (Kolkata). My documentaries on Muslim migration, race relations and white nationalism have screened on Australian national broadcasters ABC-TV and SBS-TV.