Entente Cordiale Scholar (2004-2005) and Charles de Gaulle Scholar (1998), Nathaniel is an independent scholar-activist, employed as Project Director of the National Lottery Heritage Funded project Reclaiming Community Heritage, part of 81 Acts of Exuberant Defiance, as Public Engagement Co-ordinator for Citizens Researching Together at the University of Bristol, and as Research Fellow at the University of Warwick and the University of Exeter, where they are building a database of disputed or contested colonial statues in Britain and France, for Cast in Stone.
Born in Birmingham, they are writing a book about our collective memory of the colonial and anticolonial arguments by which Birmingham built and attempted to abolish British Empire. Find out how they came to write this book by reading “My Journey in Our Struggle“, their blog for Reluctant Sites of Memory. Get a taste of some of the arguments of their book, by watching “About The House“, their keynote for the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre, by watching “Hegel and Heyrick“, their talk for Hegel (anti)kolonial at the Humbolt University of Berlin, or by listening to “Britain’s #BlackLivesMatter Statue“, their podcast for the Henry Moore Institute.
In their current work towards this book, a chapter titled “Die of Ignorance“, Nathaniel is writing a new history of “Section 28” – the law, introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s third Government, that banned local councils from “promoting homosexuality” as a “pretended family relationship”. A closer and more critical attention to the way Black Queer activists resisted Tory attacks, in the 1980s, on both anti-heterosexist and anti-apartheid education could, Nathaniel argues, equip us better, against Tory attacks, in the 2020s, to defend both Critical Race Theory and Health, Relationships and Sex Education inclusive of Trans experience.
Image credit: Ajamu
