Morag Flora Wright

Morag is a historian of the 19th century British empire and is interested in histories of movement, labour, gender and the law. Morag is interested in questions around the binarized distinctions between the public and the private, particularly as it relates to the law, the economy and the creation and maintenance of forms of social difference.

She uses the writings of feminist, queer and post-colonial to explore questions around these themes and the role of historical writing in the perpetuation of colonial, racial and sexual hierarchies. Morag’s doctoral research focusses on the construction of legalities around racialised indentured labour and seeks to understand the importance of particular constructions of domesticity and family to transformations in ideas of sovereignty, debt and property and the creation of international legal and economic systems.

Morag has a deep interest in community history and the legacies of empire. She has worked with the National Trust and History Pin to document and contexualise local histories within wider global connections, particularly within colonial histories and colonial knowledge productions.

She is also invested in community engagement within history, and the potential for history to rethink our present and future possibilities.

Morag completed her undergraduate and postgraduate in Hindi and History and Historical Research Methods respectfully at SOAS. Her masters dissertation on the spatialised lives of travelling Ayahs in the 19th and early 20th centuries won the Noor Inayat Khan Dissertation Prize in 2020.

Since 2019, Morag has been working on her PhD at SOAS under the supervision of Eleanor Newbigin. She is grateful to have been awarded  an AHRC Doctoral Studentship funded by CHASE to support her research.

Labour and the law, Family histories, Imperial legacies, Flows of capital, Concepts of sovereignty, Imaginative geographies, Feminist and decolonial histories.