Madeleine Foote

Madeleine Foote (she/her)

Madeleine Jane Foote is a scholar, journalist, historian, and DPhil candidate in the Faculty of History. Her academic interests including the ongoing mobilisation of colonial epistemologies in the academy, Indigenous and Black Studies, feminist methodologies, and the extractive research practices which perpetuate inequalities in knowledge production. She designed her doctoral research as part of a larger project co-led with the Angolan journalist and National Geographic Explorer Mauro Sérgio. Together, with a team of Angolans, Madeleine and Mauro are working with communities in rural Angolan to write a history of the region which centres the perspectives and lived experiences of local communities during colonialism and the Angolan Civil War to the present day.

Prior to her tenure as a project manager for Race & Resistance, Madeleine co-convened the independent Transnational & Global History Seminar for 2022-2023 academic year on the theme of “diaspora.” Madeleine’s activism and academic research are intertwined, and she is a UCU member as well as advocating and supporting sexual violence survivors at Oxford, including working towards more equitable and just policies for the students who face harassment, misogyny and sexual misconduct while pursuing their studies. She organized an international conference on sexual misconduct in universities called “Silence Will Not Protect Us”, the title of which is a tribute to Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.”

Before starting graduate school at the University of Oxford in 2020, she worked for National Geographic, where she collaborated on numerous storytelling, conservation, and research projects.