Blog Team and Contributors

Hello! I’m Haritha and I’m currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Global Liberal Arts. Academically, I focus on History and Politics and am currently involved with the SOAS History Society as well. Apart from that, I spend my time exploring classical Indian forms of artistic expression, focusing on Bharathnatyam and Carnatic music. Another ‘project’ of mine is learning languages from different linguistic schools. Apart from Tamil, my mother-tongue, and English, I have learnt Hindi and am currently learning Arabic at SOAS. Through my involvement with the SOAS History Blog, I hope to broaden my understanding of the discipline, while contributing to its decolonial vision.

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Ellan (eh-LAHN) is an Australian-trained freelance researcher and multi-disciplined performing artist. Their research interest in the history of music during conflict has included papers and presentations on disabled troop entertainers in WWII, the Civil Rights era and opera, and the creation of Chinese socialist realist mass songs (1920s-’40s). Their PhD research at SOAS explores the spread of Western classical music in China. Ellan has previously worked for The Australian Ballet, The Australian Federal Ministry for the Arts, and Opera Australia. Ellan is also co-founder of The (In)Equal Temperament project and former founder/director of the Con to Kabul charity concert series.

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Andrea Janku is Senior Lecturer in Chinese History at SOAS University of London. She studied Classical and Modern Sinology and Sociology at the University of Heidelberg and Chinese literature in Shanghai. Before joining SOAS she was an assistant professor in Classical Sinology at the University of Heidelberg. Her current research interests include the experience of famine and disasters in early modern and modern China, environmental history, and gender history.

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Ana Nenadović is a lecturer in Global Liberal Arts at SOAS University of London. Her research interests include Gender and Queer Studies and Hip Hop Studies.She focuses on cultural and literary links between Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. She is co-editor of the collection América Latina-África del Norte-España (2020).

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Crystal, Eunice, and Marco are a group of students from Hong Kong studying history and development studies at SOAS. They are dedicated to promoting the history and culture of Hong Kong.

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Shan is started her doctoral studies at SOAS in 2021. Her fields of interest include the Musk Road in Central Asia, Tibetan studies and medical history.

Published book: Remembrance of Lost National Treasures (in Chinese; link coming soon)

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Having returned to SOAS after two years as a gardener in an intentional community, I have recently graduated with a BA in History. My interests lie mainly at the intersections of gender history and the history of religion and belief, particularly in Africa.

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Azeem graduated from SOAS in 2019 with a BA in History. Since then, he has been working in factual television and documentary feature films as a Researcher.

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Sumayyah Wong is a BA History of Art and World Philosophies student.

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at SOAS’ School of History, Religions, and Philosophies. My current project is based on the study of clay tablets inscribed with predictions (omens) written in the Old Babylonian language, and dated to the Old Babylonian period (c. 2004-1595 BCE). The aim of my research is to investigate the content of these ancient predictions, the desires and anguish they express before unpredictable tomorrows, as well as the provenance of these tablets, with a focus on how most of these ancient Iraqi artefacts were bought by museums in Europe and the US from antiquities dealers trading from Baghdad, between the late 1880s to the late 1920s.

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Shawn is a third year student at SOAS studying a BA History and World Philosophies Joint Honours Degree. His interests are mostly to do with African and Chinese history, with any ways of adding philosophical thoughts and theories being a bonus. His favourite aspects of theses histories are the inhabitants and the social cultures.

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Omer is an international Master’s student of History at SOAS and a graduate of the University of Mysore, India. He runs a podcasting studio and hosts podcasts on Indian colonial history and Islamic Studies. He studies and observes nation-building projects of India in areas of law, education and reform influenced by the colonial narrative of communal politics in the subcontinent.

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Hamza is a final year undergraduate student studying History and International Relations. He is interested in the history of South Asia and the Middle East. His current interests include decolonising research methods, nationalism and frontier history.

I am a Japanese Studies MA student at SOAS with interdisciplinary interests in exploring the impact on society of media, politics, and economy. My aim is to relate experiences through a syncretic and systematised interpretation of case studies to examine what they may mean on a macro-level. My BA History dissertation was on the role of myth in re-examining depictions of the Asia-Pacific War, my MA studies hope to engage with discourses on transgender sentiment and philosophies of experience in Japanese media.

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Tariq is currently a doctoral researcher in the History at SOAS. He completed his BA and MPhil in Theology, Philosophy and Religious Studies at Cambridge where he majored in Islamic Studies, Greek Philosophy, Mediaeval Christian Theology, and Chinese Philosophy and undertook research on the developments of Islamic theology in late-imperial China. He has previously taught Religion and Society for several years at GCSE and A-Level and lived in Japan as an educational consultant before returning to the UK to start his PhD at SOAS.

Currently funded by CHASE DTP (Consortium under the AHRC).

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Geography and Development Studies Graduate, currently training with Teach First and the IOE to be a Mathematics teacher.

Click here to listen to Chanté’s podcast interview.

From 2020 to 2021, Darja Wolfmeier was an Erasmus Exchange student at SOAS, taking classes in Postcolonial and Development Studies as well as Gender History. Originally from Germany, she is a Master’s student of Global History at the University of Bayreuth with special interest in African History in a Global perspective. Through her double bachelor’s degree in History at the Universities of Paris (formerly Paris Diderot, France) and Bielefeld (Germany), she developed her interest in different historical experiences national narratives and (post)colonial entanglements.

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Mia is an undergrad alumni from SOAS with a degree in History and Korean. Having worked in the arts for charity and organisational development sectors, she is currently pursuing a career in humanitarian project management.

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Saffa is an interdisciplinary researcher and recent SOAS graduate in History and African Studies. Her work is mainly concerned with the ability of music to shape our understanding of transnational identities and historiography. She is committed to creating work outside of the boundaries of mainstream academia by adopting mediums such as film, sound and storytelling to present her research.

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Amaani is a first year BA History student at SOAS. She has an interest in the impact of colonialism, the unheard stories and perspectives within historical writing. She also has an interest in poetry and literature.

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Joe is an art historian specialising in East Asia, with a particular focus on Japan. Joe’s research mainly engages with queer and gender discourse, particularly focusing on the representation, significance, and development of of Japanese gender construction within society.  Joe is also a freelance curator and works closely with contemporary artists.

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Henny Ziai is a Lecturer in the History of the Middle East and Africa at SOAS. Her current research project is on histories of debt, capitalism, and political resistance in Ottoman Sudan. She uses the archive of the Mahdist rebellion as a conceptual repository through which to reinterpret those histories.

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Reece is currently studying on the MA History programme at SOAS, after graduating with a BA in History and Politics from Queen Mary University of London in 2021. He specialises in the history of the modern Middle East and his master’s dissertation, titled ‘From Johannesburg to Jerusalem: applying “apartheid” to Israel-Palestine’, examines the strengths and weaknesses of applying the term apartheid to the current situation in Israel-Palestine.

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Alexa is currently pursuing an MA in History with Intensive Arabic at SOAS University of London. They graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama, and are interested in performance cultures in the Middle East. 

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João is currently pursuing a MA History at SOAS University of London, after graduating in Law in Portugal. He focuses on the study of African History, with a particular interest in histories of resistance in countries colonised by the Portuguese Empire.

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Tara is a History graduate and also recently completed an MA in Songwriting at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance. She is particularly interested in using songs and theatre as an ‘alternative archive’ through which oral histories can be preserved. 

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Emmanuella is an undergraduate History student undertaking modules with an Afrocentric and East Asian centred approach. After graduating she hopes to continue her studies at SOAS by completing a history masters. 

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Lucy Kernick is studying towards an MA in History. She is interested in South African history, particularly social history and the history of gender.

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David is studying towards an MA in History. His particular interest is the colonial and postcolonial history of South Asia. He was born in Northern Ireland, in time to be an eyewitness to the Troubles for the whole span of that conflict. After serving in the British Army, he pursued a career in industry, before moving on to the City of London. His career has been punctuated by major industrial and financial scandals. It is probably just a coincidence. He is married, with children and grandchildren.

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