Meleisa Ono-George

I am a social-cultural historian of race and gender, with a focus on Black women’s histories in Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean. I teach modern British history, including: History of the British Isles, covering from 1688 to 1951; Approaches to History (Art, Histories of Race, Histories of Women and Gender); Body and Emotions; and, Race, Sex and Medicine in the Early Atlantic World​​. I also convene and teach Black Women and British Society, 1750s-1890s.

I started my undergraduate degree in history, with a double minor in Caribbean Studies and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Toronto but left after a year to work in community organising and education. Following a six-year hiatus from university, which included traveling and working for several years in Japan, I completed my undergraduate degree and immediately pursued a master’s in history at the University of Victoria, BC. I was awarded the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Scholarship (SSHRC) to pursue a PhD, which I did at the University of Warwick. My dissertation focused on discourses and practices of sexual-economic exchange in Jamaica and Britain from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century.

Following my PhD, I worked for a year as an Education and Outreach Officer at the Modern Records Office in Coventry before taking up a permanent position in 2016 as Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Student Experience in the History Department at the University of Warwick. In October 2021 I took up the position of Associate Professor and Brittenden Fellow in Black British History at the Queen’s College.

I am interested in the everyday ways people oppressed within society negotiate and navigate structures of power and inequality, as well as the legacies and politics of writing such histories within contemporary society.

I am also interest in community-engaged research practices, as well as creative and Caribbean storytelling methodologies. My current project is a book entitled, My Name is Amelia Newsham: Science, Art and the Making of Race, forthcoming from Viking Books in 2026.