REAG Steering Committee

Dr Christina de Bellaigue (Co-Convenor of Steering Committee, Faculty Member)

Professor Christina de Bellaigue

Dr Christina de Bellaigue is Associate Professor of Modern History. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of nineteenth-century France and Britain. She is interested in the history of education, the history of childhood and adolescence and is currently working on a new project on middle class family strategies and social mobility.  Her publications include a Special Issue of Cultural and Social History (2019) edited with Eve Worth and Helena Mills entitled ‘Rags to Riches? New histories of social mobility in Modern Britain’ and an edited collection entitled Home Education in Historical Perspective (2016). In 2013 she received funding from TORCH to set up “Rags to Riches?” an interdisciplinary research network exploring qualitative approaches to the history of social mobility.  She is currently Vice-Chair of the History Faculty.

Dr Faridah Zaman (Co-Convenor of Steering Committee, Faculty Member)

Dr Faridah Zaman

Dr Faridah Zaman (Co-Convenor of Steering Committee, Faculty Member) is Associate Professor of the History of Britain and the World. She currently has two main areas of research. The first is a study of Muslim political activists, religious scholars, journalists and poets in early twentieth-century British India, situating developments in their thought within a history of worldwide war, political revolution, and imperial decline. The second research area concerns history as an academic discipline in Britain from the late eighteenth century, and its relationship to the expansion and legitimisation of empire. She has also written on British socialism, memory and nostalgia, heritage and imperial visual culture, and political visions of the future in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has been chair of the Faculty’s Race Equality Working Group since 2019.


Xaira Adebayo (Undergraduate Representative)

Xaira Adebayo

Xaira Adebayo is a final-year undergraduate History student at Pembroke college. She believes when it comes to institutional reform, students shouldn’t be expected to take on the brunt of the work, but that their voices are still valid and crucial. She has worked with both the Bodleian libraries and the Museum of Oxford on a project to revise the history of black individuals at Oxford, and how to utilise this in an effort to change our narratives of identity and anti-racism. As a Black history student, she finds it hard to see herself reflected in the current history curriculum outside of the theme of oppression. She is hoping that the work that will be undertaken this academic year will be one of the first steps in correcting this misrepresentation. She looks forward to creating a tangible change for current and prospective students as part of the steering committee.

Ciara Garcha (Undergraduate Representative)

Ciara Garcha

Ciara Garcha is a second-year History student at Hertford College. She is from Manchester. Her passion for history began with attempting to understand her mixed Punjabi-Irish-English heritage. Inspired by this personal interest, she hosted an online exhibition on the South Asian diaspora, as part of South Asian Heritage Month. In addition to this, she is a member of the Our Shared Cultural Heritage Young Collective at Manchester Museum, consulting on and participating in projects to engage young members of the South Asian diaspora and our peers in South Asian heritage.  She is excited by the work the Race Equality Action Group is doing and looks forward to a history, in which we are all represented.

Professor Steven Gunn (Faculty Member)

Professor Steven Gunn

Professor Steven Gunn is Professor of Early Modern History and Fellow and Tutor in History at Merton College. He teaches and researches the history of later medieval and early modern Britain and Europe. His current research concerns accidental death and everyday life in sixteenth-century England. He has also published in the wider fields of Tudor government, warfare, foreign policy and political culture and the comparison of the English state in this period with others in Europe. He writes for BBC History Magazine and History Today, has contributed to radio and television programmes such as In Our Time and Time Team, and speaks regularly to Historical Association branches and sixth-form conferences.

Zobia Haq (Postgraduate Representative)

Zobia Haq

Zobia Haq is a second-year DPhil student in History at Mansfield College, looking at the 1971 Pakistan-Bangladesh war. She has wide experience in terms of trying to tackle structural inequalities, including mentoring BAME graduates in her previous workplace, increasing female participation in Cambridge’s Islamic Society through the role of Women’s Socials Officer as an undergraduate, and her current work as Mansfield MCR BAME and Women’s Officer. She encourages colleagues to contact her if they want to have a chat about REAG, or would like to share any suggestions or comments. 

Naomi Kellman (External Advisor)

Naomi Kellman

Naomi Kellman joined Rare in 2011, where she founded Target Oxbridge, a programme that has helped over 200 Black African and Caribbean students secure Oxbridge offers, and currently supports 160 students a year. Naomi spent 2012-2015 working on education policy at the Department for Education and the Treasury and has served as a secondary school governor. Naomi co-founded the BAME Fast Stream Network and the Oxford Black Alumni Network, and has made appearances on Sky News, BBC News, BBC Radio and Channel 5 News to discuss Oxbridge access and diversity in recruitment. She is currently Rare’s Senior Manager for Schools and Universities, a member of the Foundation Oxford Advisory Group, and a member of the University of Oxford’s History Faculty Advisory Panel.

Caine Tayo Lewin-Turner (Postgraduate Representative)

Caine Tayo Lewin-Turner
Caine Tayo Lewin-Turner is a second-year MPhil History student based at St Edmund Hall. His research explores Afro-diasporic interactions, primarily focussing on collective memory, racialised identities, trauma, gender, and sexuality. Currently, Caine is looking at public displays of emotions amongst black men in various temporal and spatial contexts. Outside of academia, Caine has worked with Bristol Museums, Historic England, DCMS, Brighton Museum, Stuart Hall Foundation, and more, in a bid to push forward decolonial conversations and actions in Heritage and historical pedagogy. Whilst a student at the University of Bristol, Caine organised a series of interdisciplinary lectures, seminars, and workshops dealing with racialisation and racism, blackness, and decolonialisation.

Dr Alexander Morrison (Faculty Member)

Dr Alexander Morrison

Dr Alexander Morrison  is Fellow and Tutor in History at New College, Oxford. He was previously Professor of History at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, Lecturer in Imperial History at the University of Liverpool, and a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868-1910. A Comparison with British India (2008) and of The Russian Conquest of Central Asia. A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814-1914 (2020). In 2012 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme prize for his work on the history of Russian rule in Central Asia and the comparative history of empires.

 Dr Sadiah Qureshi (External Advisor)

Dr Sadiah Qureshi

Dr Sadiah Qureshi is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham. At the broadest level, her research interests focus on modern histories of racism, science and empire. Her first book, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2011) explored the importance of displayed peoples for histories of race and the emergence of anthropology. She is currently writing her next book, provisionally entitled Vanished: Episodes in the History of Extinction, for Allen Lane. This research is currently supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. She is also Co-Chair of the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity & Equality Working Group. With this group, she co-authored the society’s first report on racial inequalities in UK HE Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change (RHS, 2018).

Professor Richard Reid (Faculty Member)

Professor Richard Reid

Professor Richard Reid is Professor of African History. His research centres on modern Africa, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  He is particularly interested in the culture and practice of warfare in the modern period, and has focused on the transformations in violence in the late precolonial period (the nineteenth century), as well as on more recent armed insurgencies, especially those between the 1950s and the 1980s. He also works on historical culture and memory, especially around trauma and upheaval, and one strand of his research involves an exploration of how the ‘precolonial’ is perceived and understood in modern Africa (as well as in modern Europe). While some of his published work spans the continent as a whole, his primary research is on East and Northeast Africa, including Uganda and the Great Lakes region, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.

 Dr Jonathan Saha (External Advisor)

 Dr Jonathan Saha

Dr Jonathan Saha is Associate Professor (South Asian History) at the University of Durham. His research focuses on the history of British imperialism in Myanmar (Burma) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently writing a book on the history of animals in the colony. His first book, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State (2013) looked at the history of corruption in the Ayeyarwady delta. He has just finished an Independent Social Research Foundation mid-career fellowship on the topic of "Accumulation and Empire". The project explored the utility of the conception of accumulation for better interrogating the imperial past. 

 Professor Barbara D Savage (External Advisor)

barbara d savage

Professor Barbara D Savage is an historian and the Geraldine R Segal Professor of American Social Thought in the Department of Africana Studies of the University of Pennsylvania.  She specializes in twentieth century African American history.  She was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford in 2018-2019.  At Penn, she has assumed several administrative positions, including department chair.  She has published two books:  Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (2008) and Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (1999).  Her co-edited works are: Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015) and Women and Religion in the African Diaspora (2004).

Professor Stephen Tuck (Faculty Member)

Professor Stephen Tuck

Professor Stephen Tuck is Professor of Modern History. His research interests include modern race equality struggles in Britain and America, the relationship between religion and racism, and the writing of national history. His most recent book is The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest (2014). Other recent books (with Robin Kelley) The other special relationship: race and rights in Britain and America (2014). Previous books include an interpretative synthesis of the long struggle for civil rights in the United States, We Ain't What We Ought To Be: the black freedom struggle from emancipation to Obama (2010) (a companion website with audiovisual materials is weaintwhatweoughttobe.com).

 Dr Kristy Warren (External Advisor)

Dr Kristy Warren
Dr Kristy Warren is Lecturer in Black History at the University of Lincoln and a researcher on a collaborative ESRC-funded project on ‘Mental, Neurological and Substance Abuse Disorders in Guyana's Jails 1825 to the present day' shared between the University of Leicester and the University of Guyana. She was previously a Research Fellow on the collaborative Bigger Picture project within the Centre for Research in Race and Rights, at the University of Nottingham. The project investigating the impact of inter-generational arts programming on the experiences of exclusion and isolation within marginalised communities in Nottingham. She also worked with Dr Karen Salt on the Common Cause Project helping to map past and present partnerships between UK university researchers engaged in arts and humanities work with and alongside racialised and minoritised community groups. Prior to that she was Research Associate on the ‘Structure and Significance of British Caribbean Slave-ownership 1763-1833’ project at University College London.

Eunice Yu (Postgraduate representative)

cd reag steering committee eunice yu

Eunice Yu is a second-year DPhil Student in the History of Art at Wolfson College. Her research focuses on the networking of print-publishers in sixteenth-century Venice. As a first-generation BAME student, Eunice is a passionate advocate in diversifying the next generation of historians and their curriculum. Acutely aware of the social and cultural barriers that prevent equal access to higher education, she hopes to bring her experience in campaigning for antiracist and gender-inclusive practices within the museum and technology sectors to REAG’s steering committee.