Camilla Schofield is a historian of contemporary Britain and joined the Department of Political Economy at King's College London in January 2024.

Her research focuses on the history of discrimination, understandings of (in)equality, migration, British decolonization and 'race relations' as a field of public policy expertise. She received a BA in History and in Chemistry from Washington University in St Louis (2000) and a PhD in History from Yale University (2009). After completing her PhD, she taught for one year on a stipendiary lectureship at Balliol College, Oxford, and as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Warwick. She then took a permanent post in the School of History at the University of East Anglia and remained in that position for over a decade. There, she taught BA and MA modules in a wide range of historical subfields and served as the School's director of MA programmes, Research Director and Athena Swan Lead.

Schofield is committed to bringing historical research methods and the concerns of the discipline of history into close conversation with economics, political theory and historical political economy.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Camilla Schofield welcomes PhD supervision in all areas of contemporary British political history; the politics of migration, race and citizenship; and British and British colonial histories of economic life and economic thought.

Schofield's first book, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge, 2013), told a new history of anti-immigrant politics and developed historical understanding of decolonisation, migration and social rights in Britain. She published the first transnational history of contemporary white nationalism across the English-speaking world with Dan Geary and Jennifer Sutton in 2020. She is now working on a history of economic discrimination in Britain and its control since the 1960s.

Teaching

Schofield teaches modules in the Department of Political Economy's MA in Politics and Contemporary History, on conceptions of democracy in the UK and British political history.

Expertise and public engagement

Camilla Schofield has expertise in modern British political history, British conservative thought, the politics of migration, identity politics and post-1968 social movements in the UK and the history of British public policy on race and migration.

She has advised and presented two three-part series on Radio4, Britain's Fascist Thread (2021) and Britain's Communist Thread (2022). Both series explore the roots of these two political ideologies in Britain and the British Empire over a 100-year period. Alongside her academic work, Schofield has supported public understanding of postcolonial migration, anti-immigrant politics and white nationalism via online publications in the Boston Review, Renewal and Monitor. As part of an ongoing initiative to decolonise The National Archives (UK), Camilla developed a permanent online teaching resource with The National Archives (UK) on the UK Black Power Movement and its opposition to over-policing in London, using Metropolitan Police records held there. In 2020, she worked with a youth theatre company S.P.I.D. to bring the history of the UK Black Power Movement to life for young people, with generous support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Camila is also a part of these projects:

A New Democratic (Dis)Order: Race, Identity, and Political Mobilisation in France and the UK, c. 1970-Present, About the project | The University of Edinburgh

Britain at Home and Abroad, Institute of Historical Research Seminar, (co-convener), Britain at Home and Abroad | Institute of Historical Research (history.ac.uk)

 Selected publications

Camilla Schofield, 'In Defence of White Freedom: Working Men's Clubs and the Politics of Sociability in Late Industrial England' Twentieth Century British History 34:3 (2023), 515-551.

Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Rob Waters, '"The Privatisation of the Struggle": Anti-Racism in the Age of Enterprise' in Aled David, Ben Jackson and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (eds.), The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s (2021), 199-225.

Dan Geary, Camilla Schofield and Jennifer Sutton, Global White Nationalism: From Apartheid to Trump (2020)

Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson, 'Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the "Crisis" of the 1970s,' Twentieth Century British History 28:2 (2017), 268-304

Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (2013) Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (cambridge.org)