Dr Shahmima Akhtar FRHistS

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, 2025
• Trustee of SAMPAD (South Asian Arts & Heritage), 2024
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2022
• PhD in History, University of Birmingham, 2019
• MA in Global History, University of Birmingham, 2015
• BA (Hons) in History, University of Birmingham, 2014

Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Identity, c. 1850-1970 (Manchester, 2024) traces multiple constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays as Ireland moved from a colonial to an independent, globally-connected state. It has won the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture and received an Honourable mention for the Donald Murphy Prize for Best First Book by the American Conference for Irish Studies.

As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. The book demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland’s political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland, a separation that continues today.

My second project is provisionally titled: ‘Brown, White and Green: Whose Landscape?’. Overall, I research how marginalised communities, whether the Irish or South Asian have authenticated their selfhood within a majority hostile state. For instance, the case study of exhibitions enabled me to interrogate how the Irish imagined and re-imagined their person, community and nation over successive decades using the platform of display. This project will radically rethink health and wellness in Britain. It focuses on the more liminal ways in which marginalised bodies exist in public spaces, whether in urban industrial centres or the hills and fells of the British Isles. By broadening my scope from imagined urban utopias within parks, cities and Fairs to wild utopias in Britain whether mountainous or coastal landscapes, I am interested in investigating how marginalised communities such as South Asian women, navigated Britain’s vast countryside from the nineteenth century era. How belonging has historically been imagined in Britain tends to tie with a person’s employment, labour and profit-making capacity but what happens when we shift our lens to think about enjoyment, nature and rest. By interrogating how South Asian women utilised these spaces I intend to ask questions about where racially marginalised bodies are considered acceptable and how transgression into Britain’s wild landscapes challenges and subverts who is entitled to such spaces. This project will therefore move from the imagined space of the fairground to the actual lived space of the British Isles.

I teach on a range of undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes at the University of Birmingham. My specialist option is: ‘I was coming home’: Black and South Asian Migration to Britain (2nd year).

Courses I have taught include:

• Making of the Contemporary World (1st year)
• Discover History (1st year)
• Global History MA (Masters)
• Options in History and Heritage (1st year)
• Topics in History (2nd year)
• History of Africa in Global Context
• New Directions in Modern British Studies (Masters)

I welcome graduate students working on race, migration and empire in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain. Further, I am happy to supervise on projects related to visual and cultural histories whether looking at world's fairs, exhibitions or display in any form.
I am currently supervising topics on Oral histories and the Bangladeshi Liberation War of 1971, George V and Irish Home Rule, Black Women’s Educations in 1960s and 70s Britain, Irish and Portuguese experiences in Eurovision from 1970s to 2000s.

Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I completed my higher education training at the University of Birmingham, undertaking my BA, Masters and PhD (funded by the Arts and Humanities Council, Midlands3Cities Award). I was a Lecturer in Minorities in Multi-Ethnic Britain at Royal Holloway, University of London from 2020 to 2023. I have formerly worked as Past and Present Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Royal Historical Society and Institute of Historical Research which involved actively embedding the Race, Ethnicity, Equality Working Group’s (REEWG) strategy and policy to improve BME representation in UK History, whether working with schools and the curriculum, cultural institutions, community groups or other learned societies. I have also worked closely with museums and heritage sites (such as Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) as a researcher and consultant on shaping histories of the British Empire that are relevant to today’s populace. Overall, I am committed to researching migrant histories and thinking through their presentation in historic or contemporary visual platforms.

Disciplinary

• Co-convenor for the IHR Public History Seminar (2020–Present).
• Co-convenor for the IHR Black British History Seminar Series (2020–Present).
• Member of the Institute of Historical Research Equality Working Group (2020–Present). 
• Co-convenor for the BME Social History Network (2019–Present).

Editorial 

• Reviews Editor for Modern British History Journal (2021–Present).
• Editor for Midlands History Journal (2023-Present).