Meghan Tinsley

Meghan joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester in September 2018, after receiving her PhD from Boston University in May 2018. She also holds an MSc in Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies from the London School of Economics (2010) and a BA in International Relations and French from Wellesley College (2007). During Easter Term 2019, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. Her research brings together themes of nationalism, racialisation, state violence, and memory. Her work has been published in a number of international sociological and interdisciplinary journals, including Memory Studies, Current Sociology, Critical Sociology, Postcolonial Studies, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Her first book, entitled Commemorating Muslims in the First World War Centenary: Making Melancholia (Routledge), examines how a century-old conflict widely perceived as a European civil war remains a catalyst for constructing collective identity in two post-imperial, multicultural nations. She argues that the dominant narrative of Muslim colonial subjects at war writes the nation’s own idea of its contemporary self onto the past. In this narrative, empire is rewritten as multiculturalism, and colonial soldiers establish the conditions under which contemporary Muslims might belong to the nation.

Meghan's current research engages with contesting statues, imperial nostalgia, and decolonising the museum. She convenes the Decolonial Reading Group, which draws staff and students from across the Faculty of Humanities. She is also co-founder and co-convenor of the British Sociological Association's Postcolonial and Decolonial Transformations Study Group.

Meghan is a Member of the Editorial Boards of Sociology and The Sociological Review.