I still remember the exact page that changed everything for me. I was sitting in a dusty corner of the university library, half‑heartedly skimming a recommended reading for my postcolonial theory module, when I came across a single paragraph about the 1943 Bengal famine. It was clinical, detached, describing it as a “wartime food shortage” that claimed “some lives.” I stared at the words until they blurred. My grandfather had survived that famine. He’d told me stories of seeing bodies in the streets, of eating grass and weeds, of British policies that diverted grain to feed soldiers while millions starved. Yet here, in a textbook published by a prestigious academic press, his entire experience had been reduced to a passive, sanitised footnote. That was the moment I understood that the curriculum I was studying wasn’t neutral — it was curated, and someone, somewhere, had decided that my grandfather’s suffering didn’t warrant more than a subordinate clause.
That discovery didn’t just make me angry; it made me curious. I started noticing what was missing everywhere. My psychology lectures referenced only Western theorists, as if minds in Mumbai or Manila worked differently. My English literature syllabus included sixteen white authors and one black one, whose novel was the only text framed as “protest literature.” My economics module measured development by how closely a country resembled Britain, with no room for alternative models of prosperity. The curriculum, I realised, was a mirror that only reflected certain faces. And I wanted to understand who had built it, who it excluded, and what it would take to dismantle it.
When I decided to make decolonising the curriculum the focus of my dissertation, I knew I had to move from righteous fury to a structured, researchable question. I started by exploring what other students had already investigated. I found a collection of decolonising curriculum dissertation topics for 2026 and spent a weekend working through them. Some projects examined how British schools teach the history of empire, others analysed the representation of black and minority ethnic writers in GCSE English syllabi, and a few looked at student‑led decolonisation movements in UK universities. That breadth helped me see that my own interest — in how university reading lists are constructed and whose voices are systematically excluded — could become a focused, achievable project.
I began to shape my research. I chose to examine the reading lists of a single department (History) at three UK universities over a five‑year period, analysing the proportion of texts authored by scholars of colour and whether those texts were framed as “core” or “optional.” My supervisor helped me develop a coding framework and pointed me towards critical race theory and epistemic violence literature. For the first time, I felt like I was doing work that wasn’t just for a grade but for something that genuinely mattered — to me, and to students like me who had spent years feeling invisible in their own education.
If the curriculum you’re studying has ever made you feel erased, or if you’ve ever wondered why certain stories are told while others are buried, you already have the seed of a dissertation topic. The best research in this field comes from a place of lived experience — from the moment you noticed a gap, an omission, a silence that felt personal. Then explore what other students have already done, and use their work to shape your own question. Decolonising the curriculum isn’t an abstract academic exercise; it’s a way of demanding that the stories of people like my grandfather are no longer reduced to footnotes. That’s work worth doing.