Dr Yasmin Akhter
Heritage Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2026 - February 2027
Dr Yasmin Akhter is a scholar of global nineteenth century studies, with research specialisms in life-writing, migration literatures, and postcolonial and feminist critiques of empires. Before joining IASH, she was the BARS& BAVS-funded Nineteenth Century Matters Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Outside of her work in Edinburgh, Dr Akhter is an Early Career Fellow at Institute of English Studies (University of London), a guest researcher on the UKRI-funded project 'Inclusive Histories', and regular workshop facilitator for communities of colour in London. Dr Akhter completed her doctoral research on cosmopolitanism and life-writing accounts of displacement at Royal Holloway. Publications from this project have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture and CUSP. Her new research examines the connections between life-writing, colonial infrastructures, and informal empire.
Project title: Locating African Lives in the George Shepperson Papers
This project undertakes one of the first in-depth investigations into the archival collection of Professor George Shepperson (1922-2020), held at the University of Edinburgh. Catalogued only recently (July 2024), the collection gathers the range of literary texts that informed Shepperson’s work as a historian of East and Central Africa, especially during the years of Britain’s imperial rule and after. However, as I argue, the Shepperson collection is remarkable for the multitude of African voices it textually preserves from the early to late twentieth centuries. In letters, wittness statements, and interview transcripts scattered throughout the collection, East and Central Africans—both at home and abroad—lent their knowledge and lived experiences to Shepperson’s research. In so doing, they re-constructed their positions from colonised peoples to anti-imperial subjects under Britain’s Protectorate rule. Over the course of the six-month Heritage Collections Fellowship, I will maps the constellation of African lives that remain alongside Shepperson in his papers. The project draws together current scholarship in (post)colonial life-writing, archive studies, and de-coloniality to demonstrate the anti-colonial stakes of excavating African lives from the Shepperson papers.