Dr Rochelle Rowe (PhD, FRHistS, SFHEA) is a historian whose work focuses on the cultural history of race, gender and the body. She is a Lecturer in Black British History at the University of Edinburgh.  

 

Her first book, Imagining Caribbean Womanhood: race, nation and beauty competitions, tells a Black Feminist history of beauty spanning the Caribbean, Harlem and London and is published in paperback by Manchester University Press. Whilst she continues to explore these themes in Black British History, recent research has also explored the lives and labours of black art models in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. Her newest research project explores performative blackness (racial imitation) in connection with histories of performance and Black Histories in Scotland, in partnership with Scotland’s major libraries and archives.  

 

Rochelle’s teaching focuses on Black Histories in the British Empire and includes dedicated courses on Carnival in the Atlantic World, Representations of Blackness in Britain and Europe, Black Activism in Britain since 1800 and Black Feminist Thought.