Meghan Tinsley

Meghan Tinsley 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). She has held visiting fellowships or engaged in research collaborations at the University of Cambridge, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Ghana, Legon.

Meghan's research brings together themes of nationalism and the memory of empire. Her recent projects have engaged with contesting statues, imperial nostalgia, and decolonising the museum. 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 project, Commemorating and Constructing the Postcolonial Nation, considers how the memorialisation of the anti-colonial struggle constructs the postcolonial nation. To approach this question, the project will use qualitative mixed methods, combining case studies of eight statues with a database of every state-funded monument erected since independence or departmentalisation in Ghana, Guinea, Barbados, and Martinique. These four societies represent the two poles of the transatlantic slave trade, shaped by global histories of empire, slavery, and struggle. The selection of countries—two West African and two Caribbean, two Anglophone and two Francophone—provides the opportunity to trace the transnational movements that construct pathways out of colonialism.

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