About this Event
Join us for a conversation with University of Edinburgh Teaching and Research Fellow in Black British History Dr. Olivia Wyatt.
Olivia will share insights into her research on the dynamics of pigmentocracy. Through a focus on the role of complexion in the job and renting market, the unfixed relationship between complexion and social mobility, and the intergenerational reproduction of colourism, Dr Wyatt demonstrates the messy but nonetheless important ways in which pigmentocracy was simultaneously upheld and challenged.
By reinserting the specificities of colour into the processes of racialisation, Dr Wyatt shifts our understanding of race beyond a simplistic White/Black binary in Britain.
About Dr Olivia Wyatt
A public intellectual with a strong trackrecord in supporting discussions on Black history in mainstream media, Olivia is based in Edinburgh but she was born and raised in Leeds. She wrote her multi-award-winning MA dissertation on Caribbean women’s activism in the inner-city suburb of Chapeltown, which features within the New Perspectives on Black British History series (Pluto Press, 2023) . Her research documents how the lived truths of Black subjects, both within the imperial metropole and the colonies, unravel the national myth of a homogenous, liberal kingdom. She currently examines the politics of complexion within Black British communities throughout the twentieth century. Olivia is also an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and she was previously a Visiting Fellow of the University of the West Indies (St. Augustine). She received a doctorate from Queen Mary University of London, a MA in Race and Resistance from the University of Leeds, and a BA Honours in History from the University of York. As an undergraduate student Olivia founded alongside Clare Burgess. Subsequently she organised the conference alongside Deanna Lyncook, supported by the Institute of Historical Research, Northwestern University, and QMUL.
Join Olivia and Senior SLRC Legacy in Action Research Fellow Dr. Fatima Rajina in a thought-proviking conversation on Olivia's work.
Event venue & nearby stays
Trinity House, The Newarke, Leicester, United Kingdom
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