Aleena Din

Background

About Aleena Din

I am a social historian of modern Britain, with interests in histories of migration, labour, race and gender from the mid-twentieth century to the present. As a Simon Research Fellow, I will be producing original research on the labour and resistance histories of working-class South Asian women in Britain, to examine how they navigated and challenged their position as the lowest paid workers in Britain, from 1948 to 2005. This research will draw on my interests in oral history and community history. I completed my DPhil (PhD) at the University of Oxford in 2022, where I was awarded an AHRC-Balliol College Peter Storey Scholarship to study the migration, settlement and labour experiences of working-class British-Pakistani women who settled in northern England between 1962-2002.Between 2021-2022, I was a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford, for a project on the long history of race, resistance and belonging at the University of Oxford. Between 2023-2025, I was a Senior Research Associate for the AHRC-funded digital humanities project, ‘Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830 to the Present’, led by the University of Bristol and QMUL, in partnership with the British Library. Using archival materials and oral history interviews, ‘Remaking Britain’ highlighted how South Asian people and communities have affected social, political and economic change across the period. Major outputs include a free educational website, South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories, as well as the upcoming book South Asian Britain: Traces, Connections, Encounters, for which I am co-author. In addition, I was a co-lead for the community history project, ’A Muslim History of Oxford’, in partnership with the University of Oxford’s Community History Hub at the Faculty of History and the national heritage organisation, Everyday Muslim. The project aimed to document and preserve the history of Muslims living, working and studying across Oxford from the late nineteenth century to the present. This research will form that basis of various academic and public engagement outputs, including a digital archive. In 2023, I was awarded the TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) Knowledge Exchange Fellowship and TORCH Innovation Award.