Avtar brah biography of christopher

Ugandan-British sociologist

Avtar Brah is a Ugandan-British sociologist. She is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, and a pioneer of diaspora studies.

Avtar brah biography of christopher

Life

Avtar Brah was born in the Punjab and grew up in Uganda.^[1] Her mother tongue was Punjabi, and she recalls reading the novelist Nanak Singh, the eighteenth-century poet Waris Shah and the contemporary poet Amrita Pritam as a young person.

In the late 1960s she studied on a scholarship in the United States before coming to Britain in the early 1970s, where she worked as a researcher at the Ethnic Relations Unit at Bristol University. She was left a stateless refugee in Britain after Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from Uganda.

She began her PhD in the mid-1970s, researching Asian communities in Southall, and moved to Southall as a community worker when her research contract at Bristol University ended. She participated in a demonstration against the National Front at wh