History, as an academic discipline, has a problem with its lack of diversity. This is a real issue for a field of scholarly activity where seeking to understand the world as it appears from very different perspectives underpins much of what we do.

As Meleisa Ono-George noted in the plenary session of our recent conference (which you can watch here), amongst the 6.1% BME academic staff in UK university History departments there are only 15 black historians. Until this month, there was no black and female History Professor in the country.

That changed when Dr Olivette Otele was promoted from Reader to Professor at Bath Spa University…