Decolonising the Curriculum: Keynote with Shami Chakrabarti -POSTPONED

A lawyer, she is Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Bristol and the University of Manchester and an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge and Mansfield College, Oxford and a Master of the Bench of Middle Temple. She was previously Chancellor of both Oxford Brookes University and then the University of Essex.

Born in London in 1969, the child of Indian parents who moved to Britain in the Fifties (her father was a book-keeper and accountant, her mother a shop assistant), Chakrabarti went to a state school near Brent before gaining a place to study law at the London School of Economics.

Called to the Bar in 1994 she worked as a lawyer in the Home Office from 1996 until 2001 for Governments of both persuasions. After five years she became the in-house counsel for the National Council for Civil Liberties (Liberty).

Aged 34, she was appointed as Liberty’s Director, a position she held from 2003-2016. With it, she became the country’s most prominent spokesperson against what she saw as the erosion of civil liberties. In 2011 she was a member of the panel of the Leveson Inquiry, the judicial inquiry into UK phone hacking.

Jeremy Corbyn announced her as the only Labour appointment to the House of Lords in August 2016. When asked about the appointment, a spokesman for Corbyn said that Chakrabarti was "an ideal appointment to the Lords".

Shami’s first book, On Liberty, is published by Penguin. Her second, Of Women, was published on 26 October 2017, and details the continued impact of global gender injustice on health, wealth, education, representation, opportunity and security in the 21st century.