Meet the Team

Dr Saima Nasar is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Africa and its Diasporas at the University of Bristol. She is a social and cultural historian who works on histories of race, empire, and immigration. Committed to multi-archival and interdisciplinary research, her previous and future work contributes to developing comparative and interdisciplinary approaches in the fields of migration and imperial studies. Saima’s first monograph examines the transnational trajectories of Britain’s East African Asian population. She has also worked on the history of trauma in relation to post-war Irish diasporic communities.

She is currently leading a five-year Leverhulme Trust funded project on ‘Welfare Citizenship and Intersectional Feminism’.

Saima is reviews editor of ‘Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora’ and was previously Special Issues editor. She sits on the international board of ‘Twentieth Century British History’.

Saima is on the Brigstow Institute’s steering committee. She was previously co-director of the Centre for Black Humanities.

You can contact Saima at Saima.nasar@bristol.ac.uk

She is thoroughly trained in interdisciplinary research, especially in interdisciplinary Social Sciences. Her research areas are feminist theories and methodologies, global political and social thought, critical theory, postcolonial and subaltern studies, and modern Indian historiography, with a specific emphasis on postcolonial feminism’s interrogation of the relationship between liberalism and empire. She holds a PhD in Politics from Birkbeck College, University of London, and the PhD thesis is entitled ‘The Governmentality of Population Debates in Postcolonial India.’

During her PhD, she was a School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy (SSHP) doctoral scholarship holder and has also taught in the Department of Psycho-Social Studies at Birkbeck (London) and in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths (London). In addition to this, Dr Banerjee holds an interdisciplinary MPhil degree in Social Sciences, an MA in Women’s Studies (recipient of the Institute Gold Medal and ‘Best Student’ awards), and a BA (Honours) in Sociology with Film Studies and Journalism.

Previously, she was also affiliated with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (India) as a Junior Research Fellow and then as a Senior Research Fellow, under the auspices of two prestigious national scholarships awarded by the Government of India.

Dr Banerjee is currently writing a book on the history of the reduction of human numbers in postcolonial India. She is also working on a shorter project on postcolonial thought and sexual violence.

Her interests are in the intersectionality of race, gender, & class in social policy and housing insecurity, as well as transnational feminisms and postcolonial and decolonial theory.

Siza has a Masters degree in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies from UCL, where her reseach focused on Black feminist thought, intersectional feminism and reproductive justice. Her masters dissertation centred on Black womens histories of reproductive subjugation and resistance, tracing Black women’s resistance from the plantation economy to the 21st Century. She also has a Bachelors degree in Cultural and Media Studies from the University of Leeds, which continues to influence her research intrests and interdiciplinary practices.

She has worked closely with organisations and charities such as Big Change to address barriers and attaintment levels for Global Majority and systematically disadvantaged students. Siza is an advocate for children and young people and mentors in disadvantaged schools within her commuity. Her academic research is closely tied to her activism and she hopes that her work will bridge the gap between the academy and Black communities as she continues to work closely with grassroots organisations and charities.