Colleen Nugent McLean

Colleen is a PhD student in World History at Northeastern University, continuing after earning her MA from Northeastern in 2019. She completed her BA in History and Political Science from Union College in 2016. She has graduate certificates in Digital Humanities, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Public History. Her research interests lie broadly in how the colonial relationship colors the modern interaction between the British state and their migrants from majority Muslim former colonies. Specifically, her dissertation uses digital methods to chart the construction of modern British anti-Muslim racism, specifically the idea that Islam is inherently ‘fanatical’ and ‘violent’. Using case studies on the 1857 Rebellion in India, 1898 Battle of Omdurman in Sudan, the German-Ottoman declaration of jihad during World War I, and the 1989 Rushdie Affair, her dissertation argues that the contours of language around Islam present in the colonial period provided much of language of the modern debate in the late 1980s. To do so, she uses word embedding models on The Times of London accompanied by close reading of primary sources. Her completed digital projects, as well as complete CV can be found on her personal website.