About our Guests
Olivette Otele
Olivette Otele, Distinguished Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London, specialises in colonial and post-colonial history, as well as the histories of people of African descent. A leading authority on the intersections of history, memory, and geopolitics regarding French and British colonial legacies, she became the first Black woman to hold a professorial chair in History in the United Kingdom. Otele is the author of African Europeans: An Untold History (2020).
Dr Hélène Neveu Kringelbach
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach is a social anthropologist and an associate Professor in African Anthropology at UCL, teaching in both the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) and the Anthropology department. She is also one of the academic leads of the [Black Europe] workstream at UCL’s European Institute. Her earlier research focused on dance in Dakar, Senegal. Her monograph, Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal (Berghahn Books, 2013), was awarded with the 2013 Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology by the Royal Anthropological Institute. More recently, her research has explored transnational marriages between Senegal, France, and the UK, as well as binational marriages in France.
Irenosen Okojie
Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian-British author celebrated for her innovative works, including the novel Butterfly Fish and the award-winning short story collections Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch. Her work was featured in The New York Times, The Observer, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post.
Contributing editor for The White Review and And Other Stories, she has also co-presented the BBC podcast Turn Up for The Books. Okojie has judged various literary awards, including the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award, the Dublin Literary Award, and the Women's Prize for Fiction. Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she was honoured with an MBE for services to literature in 2021. She is also the founder and director of the Black to the Future festival. Her latest novel, Curandera, is published by Dialogue Books.
