Dr. Harriet Aldrich

Harriet joined the Centre for Grand Strategy at KCL as an Ax:son Johnson Post-doctoral Research Fellow in September 2023, after completing her PhD at the University of Oxford. Her thesis explores the political and social experience of Ghanaian exiles in the latter half of the twentieth century.

During her appointment, she intends to produce a monograph entitled Unwelcome Guests: British policy toward Exiles and Global Networks of Dissent. This will be an ambitious comparative study of instances of high-profile political exile from across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, examining how the presence and activism of exiled leaders and movements disrupted the British political landscape from the 1960s to the 1990s. Fraught with ambiguity, the British government struggled to create a unified approach to these liminal figures: were they merely the inconvenient debris of past regimes, or future leaders in waiting on the cusp of effecting a triumphant return?

Harriet has a successful publication record which includes peer-reviewed articles in highly regarded journals such as the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and has been a member of the editorial board of The Round Table since 2019. She was also previously the recipient of the journal’s Harry Hodson Essay Prize.