Uma Kothari

Uma is Professor of Migration and Postcolonial Studies at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK. From 2017 to 2022 she was also Professor of Human Geography at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include colonialism, decoloniality and solidarity, mobilities and borders and, environmental change and island geographies. She has recently completed a project on Seafarers: a cultural geography of maritime mobilities spending much time amongst the archives at the Mission to Seafarers, Victoria. She has spent a number of years writing about islands and islandness based on research in the Indian Ocean and is currently involved in a project on environmental change and everyday life on small Island states funded through grants from the ARC and ESRC. She has curated numerous photographic exhibitions based on these projects. She is on the advisory board of In Place of War, a support system for community artistic, creative and cultural organisations in places of conflict, is the Vice President of the European Association of Development Institutes, and, is a founding member of the Storying Geography Collective. She is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and was conferred the Royal Geographical Society’s Busk Medal for her contributions to research in support of global development. She has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2022 – 2025) for a project on ‘Touring Britain in the 1950s: the adventures of postcolonial travellers’.