Rawan Mohamed

Profile

My undergraduate degree is in English Literature and History, where I was first introduced to postcolonial literature. My dissertation was a comparative analysis of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899).

I then completed my MA in Race and Resistance in 2019. I quickly became interested in slavery and slavery studies. My MA dissertation focused on perceptions of African Muslims in the Sokoto Caliphate, Northern Nigeria (Bilad al-Sudan) and the implications of socio-economic, political and cultural transformations during the nineteenth century.

My PhD focuses on the abolition of slavery in nineteenth-century Sudan, 1814-1899. My focus is abolitionist sentiments, slavery, slavery practices and the implications this had upon the cultural, social and political landscape of Sudan.

Research interests

My research interests extend towards transdisciplinarism and the impact literature, the oral tradition of storytelling, and music has maintained the memory of slavery and the slave trade within Sudan during the nineteenth century.

My PhD investigates how European travellers wrote about the Sudanese landscape during the nineteenth century and explores the interactions between Sudanese people, administrators and explorers. I aim to understand how sensationalist writing constructed and impacted Western perceptions of slavery in the Sudan, and how African slavery differed from the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

This research posits itself within the broader fields:

• African Diaspora
• Empire, Colonialism and Abolitionism
• Slavery and Forced Migration 
• Resistance and Abolition

Other Activities

I am a member of:

• The Royal Historical Society 
• The Royal African Society 
• The Society for the Study of the Sudans, UK

Qualifications

• BA English Literature and History
• MA in Race and Resistance