Fara Dabhoiwala is a Senior Research Scholar in history at Princeton University, and previously taught for many years at Oxford. During his year at St John's he will be researching the first-ever biography of the 18th-century Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams, who in the 1690s was born in the Caribbean to African parents enslaved by the British, but later, as a young free man, came to England – and probably studied at Cambridge – before returning to the West Indies. As part of this project, he will also be investigating an extraordinary contemporary portrait of Williams that survives at the V&A museum in London, and will be exhibited at the Fitzwilliam in 2025.
His most recent book, What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea will be published by Penguin in spring 2025. He is also the author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (Penguin, 2012). His website is dabhoiwala.com.
