She is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, and a pioneer of diaspora studies.
[1] Her mother tongue was Punjabi, and she recalls reading the novelist Nanak Singh, the eighteenth-century poet Waris Shah and the contemporary poet Amrita Pritam as a young person.
She was left a stateless refugee in Britain after Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from Uganda.
She began her PhD in the mid-1970s, researching Asian communities in Southall, and moved to Southall as a community worker when her research contract at Bristol University ended.
[3] Brah was appointed MBE in 2001, for services to race, gender and ethnic identity issues.