Poppy joined Loughborough in 2020. Prior to that, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter on the AHRC-funded project ‘Afterlives of Empire: Thinking Forward through an Imperial Past’, led by Professor Andrew Thompson. Before that she taught at the University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD at Durham University in 2015.
Poppy is a historian of decolonisation and post-colonial relationships between Britain and Africa. She is interested in the transition from colonial to independent states in the 1960s and how organisations and individuals in a variety of fields – military, political, economic, humanitarian – adapted to this transition.
Her book focused on the political relationship between Britain and Kenya in the decades after independence, the 1960s to 1980s. She examined how political elites in both countries re-thought their relationships after Kenyan independence, and how the different forms of diplomacy practiced by the two states shaped the foreign policies they followed. She argued that British diplomats encouraged personalised rather than bureaucratic policy-making in Kenya. At the same time, they naturalised this kind of personalised politics, often termed neo-patrimonialism, as something inherently ‘African’. Poppy has published on various aspects of Anglo-Kenyan relations in a number of journals.
Her current research is focused on two areas. Firstly, military decolonisation and Africanisation in East Africa. Here, Poppy explores the precarious transformation of colonial armies intended to secure imperial rule to independent African militaries.
Secondly, the history of humanitarianism and NGOs in Africa during the period of decolonisation. This includes work on ‘The Big Survey’ of NGOs carried out in the 1960s, and research into the Mau Mau Emergency.
Poppy teaches African and international history on a variety of modules. Poppy’s Part B module introduces students to African history from the mid-nineteenth century, spanning the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial eras.
Currently Supervising
- Ellie Strangeways, ‘Anarchists against empire: British anarchism in the struggle against colonialism (1945-1970)’
- Jessica Bonfils, ‘The Afro-Cuban diaspora and Pan-Africanism: the intervention in Angola (1975-1991)’
Book
- Kenya and Britain after Independence: Beyond Neo-Colonialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, 2017) https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319562759
Articles
- ‘Military Decolonisation and Africanisation: the first African officers in the Kenyan Army’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 17, no. 3 (2023), pp. 515–533 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17531055.2023.2257897
- ‘‘Why does Africa matter and what should be our aim?’ Decolonisation and the 1965 East and Central African Heads of Missions meeting’, Britain and the World 15, no. 2 (2022), pp. 95–119 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/brw.2022.0388?af=R
- With Steve McCorriston and Andrew Thompson, ‘The “Big Survey”: Decolonisation, Development and the First Wave of NGO Expansion in Africa after 1945’, International History Review 44, no. 4 (2022), pp. 721-750 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07075332.2021.1976810
- ‘‘Playing Cold War politics’: The Cold War in Anglo-Kenyan Relations in the 1960s’ Cold War History 18, no. 1 (January 2018), pp. 37-54 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14682745.2017.1387774
- ‘Operation Binnacle: British Plans for Military Intervention against a 1965 Coup in Kenya’, The International History Review 39, no. 5, (December 2016), pp. 791-809 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07075332.2016.1261917
- ‘Funeral Planning: British involvement in the funeral of President Jomo Kenyatta’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44, no. 3 (June 2016), pp. 513-532 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2016.1175737
Book Chapters
- ‘Adapting to Independence: The East Africa Association, Post-Colonial Business Networks and Economic Development’, in Véronique Dimier and Sarah Stockwell (eds.), The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2021), pp. 69-97 https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030511050
- ‘British Defense Engagement and Defense Advisers in Kenya after Independence’, in Greg Kennedy (ed.), Defense Engagement since 1900: Global Lessons in Soft Power (Kansas: Kansas University Press, 2020), pp. 158-182 https://kansaspress.ku.edu/home/new-notable/978-0-7006-2948-0.html