Manchester historian honoured by the Royal Society

03 Sep 2025

Professor Sadiah Qureshi awarded the prestigious Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture.

Professor Sadiah Qureshi has been awarded the prestigious Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture by the Royal Society for her distinguished and internationally-recognised specialism in subjects related to science, race and empire, and the recent timely publication on extinction in the natural world as a relatively modern concept.

The medal is given for excellence in a subject relating to the history, philosophy or social function of science.

Professor Qureshi is a historian of race, science, and empire. Her research explores how racialised knowledge has been produced, circulated, and mobilised in the modern world to create hierarchies of value for life on earth. Her work traces the lasting legacies of these ideas and practices for a variety of present-day political issues, from antiracism to land rights, and conservation, in the present.

Her latest book, Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, published by Allen Lane/Penguin Press on World Environment Day 2025, was shortlisted by the Royal Society for its 2025 Trivedi Science Book Prize. The Financial Times recommended it as one of their books to read in 2025.

Her previous book, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthrpology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011), is a prize-winning, landmark survey of the commercial exhibition of displayed peoples in nineteenth-century Britain. It explored the importance of these shows for intercultural encounter, theories of racial difference, and the development of anthropology as a discipline.

Based on this research, Professor Qureshi was a historical advisor for a recent documentary about displayed peoples for Channel 4 presented by the Booker Prize nominated writer Nadifa Mohamed.

In addition, Professor Qureshi teaches a broad range of modern history at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels with dedicated modules on histories of extinction and Black and South Asian histories of Britain. She also supervises a wide range of dissertation topics on Black and South Asian histories, race and migration, science and empire, animal studies, gender and sexuality including Black feminism and queer histories, and cultural histories of modern Britain.

This is the second consecutive year that the Wilkins-Barnal-Medawar Medal has been awarded to a University colleague – Professor of Zoology Matthew Cobb was honoured in 2024.