About our staff

Director of the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History

I am a Lecturer in Black British History at the University of Edinburgh.  I’m a cultural historian whose work focuses on race, gender, and the body, histories of the Caribbean and Black Britain. My first book, Imagining Caribbean Womanhood, tells a feminist history of Black beauty spanning the Caribbean, Harlem and postwar London and is published in paperback by Manchester University Press.

I obtained my PhD from the University of Essex in 2010 and my career in higher education includes teaching history and leading programmes of learning for researchers at Essex, Exeter and UCL where I also contributed work on anti-racism, including the first fully-funded doctoral scholarship ring-fenced for Black and Asian doctoral researchers.

I joined Edinburgh in September 2021, and teach courses on the histories of Black Feminisms, Black Activism in Britain since 1800, Carnival in the Atlantic World; Representations of Blackness in British Visual Culture.

My new research explores Blackness in British Visual Culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

RochelleRowe.com

Summary of research interests

• Britain & Ireland
• Caribbean
• Europe
• Scotland

• Comparative & Global History
• Culture
• Ethnicity
• Gender
• Imperialism
• Material Culture
• Migration
• Society

• Eighteenth Century
• Nineteenth Century
• Twentieth Century & After

My first book, Imagining Caribbean Womanhood tells a transnational feminist history of black beauty spanning the British Caribbean, Harlem and postwar London and is published by Manchester University Press (2013). 

My new research explores Blackness in British Visual Culture, 1850-1950.

Understanding Race and Colonialism

Carnival in the Atlantic World: politics, play and power

Representations of Blackness in Britain and Europe: 1800-1950

Historical Skills and Methods 1 & 2 

Black Activism in Britain since 1800

Black Feminist Approaches to History (Historical Methodologies)

Reading Visual Sources (Historical Skills and Sources)

I am on the supervisory team of the Imperial Flight doctoral research project, a partnership with National Museums Scotland. 

In 2022-23 I am supervising the doctoral research of the Visiting Graduate Fellow to the Centre for Study of Modern and Contempory History. 

I am accepting research students in the following and related areas: 

• Black Atlantic Histories 
• Histories of Beauty, Beauty Culture and Consumption
• Black Feminisms 
• Histories of the Black Experience in Britain
• Modern Caribbean History 
• Black People in the Art of Europe and the Americas