Announcing Dr Tanveer Ahmed as Inclusion Officer of the DHS

Society News

1 July, 2026

We are pleased to announce that Dr Tanveer Ahmed has been appointed as Inclusion Officer of the DHS.

This new Trustee role was created to ensure that the best practices of inclusion, equity, and diversity are enacted across the Society. The Inclusion Officer will be responsible for developing a set of clear guidelines for inclusive practices across the DHS conference, the student conference, and membership.

Tanveer Ahmed is Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Race at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London where she teaches across the fashion programme search building on her PhD research that explores alternative justice-oriented forms of fashion design by centring plural fashion narratives. She is also visiting lecturer at Gerrit Reitveld Academy, Amsterdam, HSLU, Lucerne, Switzerland and The American University of Paris. Her publications have contributed to the growing body of literatures that aim to decolonise the Eurocentric canon of fashion and she has published for International Journal of Fashion Studies, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, Costume: The Journal of the Costume Society and in edited books. Tanveer is currently completing a book 'Fashion and Anti-Racism’ (Bloomsbury forthcoming). Her research interests include fashion design, decolonial theories, fashion histories and design education.

On her appointment to the role, Tanveer commented: "There is lots of potential to bring in an intersectional lens to DHS by engaging with communities who would usually feel excluded from design histories, especially students from Further Education and Adult Education sector, working class communities, doctoral students and other underrepresented groups to build a DHS that works for the many.  I am always thinking: how would I get the Muslim community I come from, who have so much to offer, into this space? Diverse voices are vital for design history to flourish and expand beyond the canon. I would like to bring in my experiences of design research into anti-racism in fashion and community activist work into this role, and build on the excellent work of DHS."

We look forward to working with Tanveer and wish her a successful tenure as Trustee.