About us
The Walter Rodney Collective is a new research cluster in the School of History, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS, University of London.
We are named after the influential pan-African, Marxist scholar-activist, Walter Rodney, who studied for a PhD at SOAS between 1963 and 1966.
Taking inspiration from Rodney’s efforts to centre the Global South in histories of capitalism and struggles against it, we are committed to the study of historical injustice by foregrounding non-Western languages, concepts and epistemologies. We also reckon with SOAS’s relationship to colonialism and its afterlives as we explore the institution’s radical potential for activism today.
Histories of capitalism and race
Each year the SOAS Walter Rodney Collective focuses on a particular research theme related to historical injustice. In 2022/23 this theme is ‘Histories of Capitalism and Race’, asking what it means to think about histories of capitalism beyond Eurocentric conceptual frameworks – and how starting from the histories of Asia and Africa offers alternative theoretical starting points.
Members
Meet the team convening the ‘Histories of Capitalism and Race’ seminar series at SOAS.
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Hengameh (Henny) Ziai is a Lecturer in the History of Middle East and Africa at SOAS, University of London. Her research lies at the intersection of political theory, critical political economy, and Islamic studies, with a focus on formations of the colonial and the emergence of modern political subjectivity in Sudan during the long nineteenth century.
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Mattin Biglari received his PhD in history from SOAS, University of London. He is currently a Lecturer in Asian and Middle Eastern Environmental History at the University of Bristol and author of Nationalising Oil and Knowledge in Iran: Labour, Decolonisation and Colonial Modernity, 1933-51 (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
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Samia Khatun is Senior Lecturer in History at SOAS. She is a feminist historian of race relations, focussing on the life worlds and experiences of colonised peoples across the British Empire. Her current book project is focussed on the forgotten intellectual histories that shaped textiles industries spanning 18th century Bengal/Britain.
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Sarah El-Kazaz is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Middle East Politics at SOAS. Her research interests include: political economy, urbanism, infrastructure and digital politics. Her book, Building Politics: Urban Transformation and (Un)Making Markets in Cairo and Istanbul is forthcoming with Duke University Press in spring 2023, and her upcoming book project examines the political economies of digital infrastructures in the Global South, with a focus on the Cloud.
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Lisa Tilley teaches Political Ecology and Political Economy at SOAS, University of London. Her research spans the socioecological dynamics of plantations and mines and the political economy of race, among other topics.