Rawan Mohamed is a historian of slavery, abolition, and conflict in Eastern Africa, specialising in nineteenth-century Sudan and the wider Nile Valley. Her research sits at the intersection of African, Islamic, Ottoman, and imperial histories, with a particular focus on the historical relationship between warfare, enslavement, captivity, mobility, and political transformation. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at King’s College London’s Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War.

Rawan’s current book project, Slavery, Empire, and the Contested Making of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Sudan, offers a new history of the relationship between slavery, abolition, and state formation in Sudan. It examines the political, economic, military, and social structures through which slavery was sustained, while tracing how changing regimes of warfare, political authority, and imperial intervention reshaped the conditions of enslavement and emancipation. Her wider research agenda examines the mechanisms of enslavement in contexts of war and conflict, as well as the experiences, movements, and historical agency of enslaved and displaced people across Eastern Africa.

Alongside her research, Rawan has developed a distinctive interdisciplinary profile spanning historical scholarship, archival practice, publishing, teaching, and public engagement. She previously worked with Peepal Tree Press, an independent publisher specialising in Black British and Caribbean literature, where she catalogued and developed the Peepal Tree archive. The collection was subsequently acquired by the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds and now forms part of its Special Collections. This experience has contributed to her wider scholarship on archives, cultural memory, and the preservation and interpretation of underrepresented histories.

Rawan’s scholarship places particular emphasis on critical engagement with archival sources, including the circumstances in which records were produced, preserved, translated, and transmitted. She is interested in recovering perspectives that have been marginalised within the historical record while situating them within rigorous analysis of the political and social contexts in which they emerged. She is an elected Editorial Board Member of the Sudan Studies Journal and contributes to scholarly networks and conversations on Sudanese, African, Islamic, and imperial history, with particular attention to slavery, abolition, and conflict.

Research Interests

• Eastern African history
• Slavery, abolition, and mechanisms of enslavement
• Enslavement, warfare, and conflict
• Warfare, captivity, and the movement of people
• Sudan and the wider Nile Valley
• Islamic history and Muslim societies in Africa
• African, Ottoman, and Islamic worlds
• Empire, colonialism, and imperial encounters in Africa
• State formation, political authority, and military power
• Nineteenth-century African political, social, and economic history

Rawan’s research examines the interconnected histories of warfare, captivity, enslavement, and political change across Eastern Africa, with a particular focus on nineteenth-century Sudan and the wider Nile Valley. Her work explores the mechanisms through which people became enslaved during periods of warfare and political upheaval, and the ways in which raiding, captivity, displacement, and military mobilisation were embedded within wider political, economic, and social structures.
Drawing on both Arabic- and English-language sources, her research brings African, Islamic, Ottoman, and imperial histories into conversation. She is particularly interested in recovering the experiences, movements, and agency of enslaved and displaced people, while examining the institutions, political authorities, and regional networks through which systems of enslavement were maintained and transformed.

Her work also considers the relationship between slavery and the formation of political authority, tracing how conflict, mobility, and changing imperial interventions reshaped societies across the Nile Valley and Eastern Africa.
More broadly, Rawan’s research contributes to the histories of slavery, abolition, conflict, and state formation, while placing Eastern African histories within wider African, Islamic, Ottoman, and imperial contexts.

Selected Publications

• ‘Bearing Witness to Slavery: The Life Stories of Josephine Bakhita, Michele Amatore, and Sulieman Capsune’, Abolition and Slavery (under review).
• Black Girl, What Is Your Name?”: Identity, Violence and Enslavement in the Life of Josephine Bakhita’, Sudan Studies, 74 (2026), pp. 31–41.
• ‘From Chains to Change: The Differences Between African Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Trade’, The Gale Review, 8 April 2025.