To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Avtar was a Professor of Sociology at Birkbeck; a specialist in race, gender and ethnic identity issues and was awarded an MBE in 2001 in recognition of her research.

Born in India, raised in Uganda, and made stateless by the anti-Asian policies of Idi Amin in the 1970s, she was made a refugee overnight and forced to extend her stay in the UK into a long-term residence.

She attended a thousands-strong demonstration organised by women’s collective Southall Black Sisters against the National Front in the mid-1970s which gathered national media attention and resulted in hundreds of demonstrators being arrested.

Avtar lectured and researched at Birkbeck for over twenty years from 1985 until her retirement from professorship. Her most seminal works are Cartographies of Diaspora, which takes a feminist, post-structuralist lens to analysing ‘difference’ and ‘diversity,’ and Hybridity and Its Discontents, exploring the history of ‘hybridity’ across multiple continents.

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

As Access Manager (Forced Migrants), Isabelle’s work is key to Birkbeck’s commitment to its founding principle of supporting adults who would not otherwise be able to access education.

Isabelle engages with, inspires and supports forced migrants and asylum seekers to access education through Birkbeck’s award-winning, donor-funded Compass Project, which dramatically improves the lives of some of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in the UK. She joined Birkbeck following time as a volunteer supporting forced migrants. She says Compass is a vital way to “resist the negative rhetoric on migration.”

Her work contributes to Birkbeck’s recognition as a University of Sanctuary, the first higher education institution in London to be awarded this status, in 2021, for its work to provide safety, solidarity and empowerment to people seeking sanctuary.

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Elaine Hawkins was Programme Director of Birkbeck’s Certificate in Higher Education Introductory Studies from 2003-2012, which helps to get people back into studying who might lack the required entry qualifications or who need a course to help them prepare for degree-level study.

In addition to pathways in the arts, humanities and social sciences, Elaine developed new modules in nursing and business and established agreements with degree programmes across Birkbeck to enable students to progress within the College to continue with evening study.

Thanks to her drive and enthusiasm, the programme grew from around 30 students in 2003 to over 450, running in eight different centres across London. Some classes were delivered in Sure Start centres which tapped into the aspirations of women in hard-to-reach communities and this initiative won the Times Higher Education award for Widening Participation in 2008.

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Abi is a Nigerian-born award-winning novelist who received critical acclaim for her first novel, The Girl With the Louding Voice. The book won the Bath Novel Award for unpublished manuscripts back in 2018 and went on to become a New York Times bestseller.

She graduated with a Master’s in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, of which she has said: “I needed to sit with people like myself, like minds who had an interest in writing. I wanted to do something serious with it. So that’s where I started my publishing journey from. The book was part of my thesis.” She has also credited her supervisor, Julia Bell with encouraging her to enter writing competitions.

In 2021, Abi was one of the twenty-four essay contributors for You Are Not Going Back: An essay from the collection, Of This Our Country, which offers an honest depiction, told by Nigerians themselves, of the culture and traditions of their Nigerian identity. She now works in project management for an academic publisher.

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Durdana is an entrepreneur and activist and the first Muslim woman appointed as Honorary Captain of the British Royal Navy. She is a former charity director and journalist at the BBC World Service and received her degree in media and journalism from Birkbeck.

Durdana established The Pearl Foundation to teach English, reading, writing and computer skills to British-Muslim women, as well as integrate these women into wider society by building self-confidence and enhancing their quality of life. Her work with ‘The Pearl Education Foundation’ and the ‘Ethnic Minorities Foundation’ led to the recruitment of approximately 9000 students and 700 volunteers.

She was awarded ‘Order of the British Empire’ (OBE) in 2012 and is currently working on her autobiography to share her experiences and inspire the next generation: “I want the world to know how a woman from a developing country managed to follow her passions and achieve her goals.”

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and expert in crystallography who first photographed DNA to reveal its double-helix shape uncovering the mystery behind how life is passed down from generation to generation. Her commitment to the highest standards of scientific research is said to have brought “lasting benefit to mankind.”

Before that, her research specialty was coal and she was at the forefront of techniques in X-ray crystallography, which had only been used to investigate a limited range of matter by the early 1950s.

While James Watson and Francis Crick famously got the credit for ‘discovering’ the structure of DNA, it is generally accepted that Franklin’s research was more advanced. They admitted, after her death, that Franklin’s data had been crucial in proving their hypothesis.

Franklin was one of the few female chemists in the world at this time, moving from King’s College London to Birkbeck in 1953. She commented that the atmosphere at Birkbeck was friendlier, but the lab conditions were less favourable.

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

“Ma” Francis was one of Birkbeck’s unsung heroes, an essential worker during the second world war who made a considerable contribution to sustaining university life.

She joined Birkbeck’s Fetter Lane premises in 1896 as a canteen worker, and left fifty years later, aged eighty. When bombs dropped in the vicinity, she was “unruffled,” calmly handing out mugs of coffee and “sardines on toast, with fried tomatoes twopence extra.”

On 11 May 1941, incendiary bombs started falling on the College. Ma Francis made her way to the College’s kitchen. A “policeman in Fetter Lane tried to stop me,” she later recalled, who told her “Can’t go down there, Ma!” She abruptly retorted, “Impudence. Young man … I’ve got my work to do – you can’t stop me.” And work she did. Although the building next to Birkbeck was a “raging inferno,” Ma Francis made coffee for everyone on a Primus stove and then served 150 people for lunch. She was heard muttering, “Lucky I cooked the joints yesterday!”