Professor of Migration and Postcolonial Studies
Uma Kothari is a Professor of Migration and Postcolonial Studies at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK and Professor of Human Geography, School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia.
She is the Vice President of the European Association of Development Institutes, is on the advisory board of Place of War, a support system for community artistic, creative and cultural organisations in places of conflict and is a founding member of the Storying Geography Collective.
She is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and was conferred the Royal Geographical Society’s Busk Medal for her contributions to research in support of global development. She has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2022 – 2025) for a project on ‘Touring Britain in the 1950s: the adventures of postcolonial travellers’.
Her research interests include colonialism, decoloniality and solidarity, mobilities and borders and, environmental change and island geographies. She has recently completed a project on Seafarers: a cultural geography of maritime mobilities and is currently carrying out research on Environmental change and everyday life on small Island states funded through grants from the ARC and ESRC. She has curated numerous photographic exhibitions based on these research projects.