DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Modern European History: Britain and Its Empire

Thematic Field(s):  African Diaspora and African American History; Colonial, Imperial, and Diasporic History; Political and Policy History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Black British History, Transnational Race Politics, Europe and the African Diaspora, Black Feminist History

Biography

Kennetta Hammond Perry is an Associate Professor of Black Studies with a courtesy appointment in History.  She is trained in Comparative Black History and embraces interdisciplinary methods to study, interpret, teach and write histories of Black life.

Dr. Perry’s research primarily focuses upon Black diasporic lives in Britain as well as those shaped by the histories and legacies of British colonialism globally.  Her first book, London Is The Place For Me:  Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford, 2016) examined how a largely African Caribbean migrant population of Black Britons articulated claims to citizenship and publicly challenged the state to both acknowledge and remedy the ways in which anti-Black racism came to bear upon their lives in the decades following World War II.  Set against the backdrop of decolonization, growing anti-apartheid sentiment and the global circulation of the iconography of Black freedom movements in the U.S., the book offered a nuanced accounting of the web of historical agents involved in politicizing race and drawing public attention to the realities of racism as experienced by Black people in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. 

Dr. Perry’s second book, Living and Dying in David Oluwale Britain (under contract with Cambridge University Press) uses the elusive life and certain death of David Oluwale, a Nigerian-born British citizen thought to have been murdered by police in Leeds, England in 1969, to construct an intimate history of the power of the British state.  The book enlists David Oluwale as a guide through the channels of state power that funneled poor people across borders and through prisons, health care facilities, welfare offices, homeless shelters and the hidden corridors of city streets discarding them, in some instances, in paupers’ graves. Drawing from Black feminist epistemologies, this book will contribute to burgeoning conversations within Black Studies and the discipline of History about how we ethically engage and demonstrate a duty of care in our historical writing about Black lives as they are represented in archives steeped in violence and disregard for Black humanity.  Moreover, the book considers the fraught historical record of David Oluwale’s existence in Britain to examine the life-depriving entanglements defining the relationship between the imperial state, the postwar welfare state and the carceral state.  In doing so, it raises critical questions about what archives of imperiled Black lives can tell us about the operation of state-crafted violence past and present.

Before arriving at Northwestern, Dr. Perry served as founding director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University in Leicester, England.  She has also previously held fellowships with the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and she was co-investigator on the two-year grant, “Grassroots Struggles, Global Visions: British Black Power, 1965-1985,”  sponsored by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (UKRI), which examined the regional valences of ‘Black Power’ in Britain (w/ Kerry Pimblott, University of Manchester).  Currently, she is co-investigator on a three-year UKRI-funded project, “James Baldwin and Britain,” which explores the imprint of James Baldwin’s life, work and legacy in Britain (w/ Douglas Field, University of Manchester and Rob Waters, Queen Mary University of London).  She is also co-editor of the Histories of Black Europe series at Cambridge University Press (w/ Tiffany Florvil, University of New Mexico and Olivette Otele, SOAS) and serves on the academic committee of the Stuart Hall Foundation and the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and History Workshop Journal collective.

Dr. Perry welcomes inquiries from students with similar research interests who are exploring the pursuit of graduate work in Black Studies or History.

Recent Publications

• “The Prayers of David Oluwale” in Antoinette Burton, ed. Up Against the Archive:  Experiments in Writing British History Otherwise (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2027).
• “The Sights and Sounds of Black Britain:  Encounters with the Archive of David Oluwale” Twentieth Century British History (2023):  467-490.
• w/ Marc Matera, Radikha Natarajan, Camilla Schofield and Rob Waters, “Marking Race:  Empire, Social Democracy and Deindustrialization” Twentieth Century British History 34, 3 (2023):  552-579.
• “Black Futures Not Yet Lost:  Imagining Black British Abolitionism” South Atlantic Quarterly 121, 3 (2022):  541-560.
• “‘To Tell It As We Know It’:  Black Women’s History and the Archive of Brexit Britain” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 47, 2 (June, 2021):  22-35.