Sadiah Qureshi

BIOGRAPHY

Professor Qureshi joined the University of Manchester in 2023 to take up a Chair in Modern British History. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Linnean Society. You can email her by adding ‘sadiah.qureshi’ to ‘@manchester.ac.uk’.

She read natural sciences before specialising in the history and philosophy of science. She studied at the University of Cambridge for her undergraduate, postgraduate, and postdoctoral studies.

RESEARCH

At the broadest level, Professor Qureshi is a historian of race, science, and empire. Her research explores how racialised knowledge is produced, circulated, and mobilised in the modern world to create hierarchies of value for life on earth. Her research traces the lasting legacies of these ideas and practices for a variety of present-day political issues, from anti-racism to land rights, and conservation, in the present.

Race and Anthropology

Her first book, Peoples on Parade, is a prize-winning, landmark survey of the commercial exhibition of displayed peoples in nineteenth-century Britain. It explores the importance of these shows for intercultural encounter, notions of racial difference, and the development of anthropology as a discipline. Based on this research, she was a historical advisor for a recent documentary about displayed peoples for Channel 4 presented by the Booker Prize nominated writer Nadifa Mohamed.

Extinction and Empire

Her second book, Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, will be published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Press, in spring 2025. Drawing on histories of science, race, genocide, empire, conservation, animals, and museums, the book will explore how the very notion of extinction emerged, and shaped our understanding of life on earth in the Anthropocene.

Black and South Asian Migrations

Her current project explores the everyday lives of South Asians in Modern Britain. This project will draw on her longstanding interests in researching, teaching, and advocating for curriculum reform in relationship to Black and South Asian British histories. The project will have multiple threads, from public facing events, producing new oral histories, to published papers and a book. The early stages of the project are being supported by pilot grant from the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. The project will involve close collaboration with the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and Education Trust, one of Britain's leading organizations dedicated to the study of race and migration, with a particular focus on anti-racist activism and social justice.

TALKS AND PODCASTS
Professor Qureshi often discusses her research in talks and podcasts. Her most recent podcast was for Greendreamer. You can also listen to her discussing extinction for the British Academy’s Why History? Vanished: Extinction Past and Present lecture, and ONCA’s Lost Species Day 2020 events.

You can also listen to her contributions to Bonnie Greer’s In Search of Black History, Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets, Marc Fennell’s Stuff the British Stole for ABC Radio National, and Sushma Jansari’s The Wonder House podcast.

You can watch her chairing a discussion on the shifting ways public historians have used television to narrate our pasts with Ana Carden-Coyne, David Olusoga, and Michael Wood for the University of Manchester's bicentenary celebrations in 2024.

She has given talks across the world, including Princeton University, Yale University, University of Oxford, the Max Planck Institute (Berlin), Quai Branly (Paris), National Portrait Gallery (London), the inaugural HistFest, and the Presidential Address, History of Science, British Science Festival (2022).

GRANTS AND PRIZES
Professor Qureshi has won a number of prizes and grants.

In 2023, she was a Sassoon Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. You can learn more about her research during this fellowship from this film courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries.

In 2020, she was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to support her research on extinction.

In 2013, the Northeast Victorian Studies Association jointly awarded her book, Peoples on Parade, the Rudikoff Prize for the best first book in Victorian Studies published in 2011.

In 2012, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Medieval, Early Modern and Modern History by the Leverhulme Trust. 

PUBLIC HISTORY AND POLICY

Professor Qureshi's research and teaching is deeply rooted in, and informed by, public engagement, widening participation, and policy work within higher education. These interests draw on her historical expertise; experiences of growing up in several deprived areas of Birmingham; being one of very few students from her school to attend the University of Cambridge; being a first-generation academic, and one of the few professors of her heritage, especially women, in British higher education. At the Univeristy of Cambridge, she spent over a decade involved in initiatives such as summer schools and school visits. Below is a small selection of more recent activities.

Reports

Between 2019 and 2021, she was a member of the Museum Association’s Decolonisation Guidance Working Group. As a member of the group, she contributed to the Museum Association’s Supporting Decolonisation in Museums 2021 report, which provides sector wide guidance.

From 2019 to 2022, she co-chaired the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity & Equality Working Group, with Jonathan Saha, after serving as a member from the group’s foundation in 2017. In 2018, the Working Group co-authored a landmark report on racial inequalities within history as a discipline and UK higher education. You can read more about the substantial impact of the report on the Royal Historical Society’s website.

Editorial, Advisory, Grants, and Prizes

Among other commitments, she currently serves on the Advisory Council of the Institute of Historical Research, London, is a member of the History Workshop Journal editorial collective, and serves on the Editorial Board for the English Historical Review.

She frequently contributes to funding panels and grant reviews across the sector. Most recently this includes the British Academy and Wellcome Trust. She previously served on the AHRC Peer Review College and Council for the British Society for the History of Science. In this capacity, she served as a judge for the Hughes Prize and Pickstone Prize. She also judged the inaugural Olivette Otele Prize judge, awarded by Institute for Historical Research in 2021, in honour of Professor Olivette Otele.

Flux: Parian Unpacked

In 2017, she advised on an exhibition of Victorian Parian ware curated by Matt Smith and held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and wrote an essay for the exhibition catalogue. You can watch her chairing a discussion between the artist Hew Locke and curator Matt Smith on Commemorating and Contesting Empire with Victorian Ceramics.

Our Migration Story

Launched in 2016, this prize-winning website is a major resource supporting GCSE students studying the history of migration to the UK. It was sponsored by the Runnymede Trust. She contributed an article on Exhibiting Foreigners: The Case of Performing ‘Prince’ Lobengula.