I am an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. I also serve as a Fellow and Director of Studies of Education at Queens’ College, as well as the Lead Fellow for Diversity, Equality and Inclusion.
My scholarship focuses on the intersections of education, culture, and society. I approach education with a particular interest in subjectivity and power. I investigate how human subjects are constituted and how they experience cultural and social settings. My scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing on theory and modes of analysis from arts, literature, politics, sociology, media and communication studies, the law, anthropology, and history.
My first book was an auto-ethnographic portrait of New Urban Arts, an arts education organisation that I founded and led in my twenties (The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race, and the Gentrifying City, Duke University Press, 2019). I am currently working on a book project with Amina Shareef about the rise of right-wing White extremism and anti-Muslim racism in Britain. I am also launching a new area of inquiry that examines the mutual independence of Britain and the United States in sustaining their racial and colonial legacies in education.
I have received several teaching prizes, including being shortlisted in a national competition for PhD Supervisor of the Year (2023, FindAMasters). In 2019, students at Cambridge voted me the Best Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. In 2021, I received a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.
I welcome applications from doctoral students working in Education across a variety of disciplines and theoretical concerns, including: American Studies; Critical Youth Studies; Cultural Studies; British Cultural Studies; Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies; Critical Race Theory; Critical Muslim Studies; and, artistic, performance, literary, ethnographic, and cultural methods of analysis.
Students in my doctoral research group study British Muslim women’s lived experiences and biopower; international Chinese students and Anti-Asian racism at American universities; decolonising the Ghanaian visual art curriculum; textile as practice-based research; spacemaking by Black British women in elite British universities; Indian Classical Dance and Hindutva, and gendered racialization in the English Language Teaching industry in China. Prior doctoral students have studied social art practice and have written fiction as a dissertation.
I have been the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including from the Leverhulme Trust, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Echoing Green Foundation, and the Society of Royce Fellows. I hold a Masters and Doctoral degrees in Education from Cambridge and I received my bachelor’s degree (History of Art and Architecture) from Brown University.
