Jenna Marshall is a Lecturer in International Studies at King’s College London. Before her appointment at King’s in 2022, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Universität Kassel in Germany (2019 -22) and a Sassoon Visiting Fellow in Black and South Asia History at the University of Oxford. Jenna completed her PhD at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), where she explored Pan-African social movements and political contestations of development agendas in the Anglophone Caribbean. Prior to her doctoral research, she completed a Masters in International Relations at QMUL (2009-10), and an undergraduate degree in International Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada (2006-09). She currently serves as the Research Area Lead under the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP) for Global Order and Security. She also serves as co-convenor of the Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial working group of the British International Studies Association (BISA). Jenna has also worked in the field of journalism in the Caribbean and was awarded a Barbados national merit scholarship in 2005.

Upcoming events

Workshop: Counter/Mapping Research
Over three days, this course will trace and develop methodological-conceptual tools to help students unearth and make sense of the violence and complexities of doing research within the current global order. Deeply interdisciplinary, the course draws from methodological approaches across literature, history, sociology, geography, anthropology, and political science in order to equip students with new tools for counter/mapping histories, connections and relations shaped by empire; and the different struggles, experiments and modes of living that shape other stories, knowledges and approaches to the world.

2-4 June, starting 10.00, Queen Mary, University of London. Register here.

Workshop: Summer Lab – ‘Unsettling the Polycrisis’
Over three days, students will join discussions that reconcile the theme of ‘polycrisis’ with and through a range of critical postcolonial and decolonial theories, with a focus on the material structures that shape global financial, political, cultural and conceptual architectures. We will encourage a more experimental and generative approach to the lab-work by bringing together students and staff who focus on different sites, methods, histories, lenses and analytical starting points to 1) unsettle, challenge and re-conceptualise what constitutes ‘the polycrisis’; 2) map out the multiple threads that constitute and structures the entanglements of past, present and future crises; 3) develop other ‘grammars’ and possibilities, that take us beyond ‘crises’.

23-25 June, starting 10.00, King’s College London. Register here.

Office hours

Monday: 15.00 - 17.00

Research interests

Empire and race, political economy of the global south, plantation economy, Fabian socialism, decolonial methodologies, the Caribbean, pedagogy, resistance and social movements

Teaching

• Introduction to International Economics
• Colonialism, Plantation Economies and Global Capitalism

Latest publications

Special issues

(2024) Introduction to the Symposium on Race and Imperialism in International Relations. (co-edited with JK Gani). Read the introduction here. 

(2022) Race and Imperialism in International Relations: Theory and Practice. International Affairs 100th Anniversary Special Issue. Vol. 98(1) (co-edited with JK Gani) https://academic.oup.com/ia/issue/98/1

Journal articles

(2022) The impact of colonialism on policy and knowledge production in International Relations. International Affairs. Vol. 98(1) 5 – 22. (co-authored with JK Gani) https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab226

(2020) Postcolonial paradoxes, ambiguities of self-determination and Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire. Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Vol. 48(3) 340-350. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829820939618

Research and media

“Decolonization and its discontents, a review of Olufemi Taiwo's Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously”, The World Today, Aug 2022 https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2022-08/review-decolonization-and-its-discontents

Swali, A. (Hosts). “Race and Imperialism in International Relations” (No. 99) [Audio podcast episode]. Undercurrents. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/02/undercurrents-race-and-imperialism-international-relations 11 Feb 2022

“Early Career Series Interview – Jenna Marshall”, E-International Relations, https://www.e-ir.info/2020/05/28/interview-jenna-marshall/ May 2020