Michael Collins

Background

About Michael Collins

I am an associate professor of modern and contemporary British history in the Department of History at UCL."Windrush Cricket", my book on the history of Caribbean migration to England after 1948 and the importance of recreational, community, and semi-competitive cricket for the Windrush generation was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. In the 'cricket space', I was a commissioner at The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC), 2021-2024 and am the principal investigator (PI) for UCL's Caribbean Cricket Archive - https://caribbeancricketarchive.memorymapper.org - working with fellow historian Dr Montaz Marché and with Dr Leah Lovett and Dr Duncan Hay at UCL's Bartlett School of Architecture. My next research project - for late 2025 through 2026 - is "On Toleration: Conversations with Tagore's India": it's a study of Rabindranath Tagore's ideas about freedom of speech, creativity, diversity, and university life, set within the context of India's intellectual traditions of "disagreeing well". I'm grateful to UC Berkeley for inviting me to be a visiting professor on this topic in the Spring of 2025.