Michael Keith is Director of the PEAK Urban Research programme. Until October 2019, he was the Director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford (seconded until 2024). He was until 2021 co-ordinator of Urban Transformations (The Economic and Social Research Council portfolio of investments and research on cities), and is the Co-Director of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities. He is also Co-Investigator of the Open City research project.
His research focuses on migration related processes of urban change. His most recent works include ‘Urban transformations and public health in the emergent city’, and African Cities and Collaborative Futures, both published by Manchester University Press and The Unfinished Politics of Race, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
He has experience outside the academy working in the community and voluntary sector and as a politician for twenty years in the East End of London, leader of a London local authority and founder, chair and board member of a wide range of urban regeneration companies and public/private partnerships. He has also several decades experience in the voluntary sector, initially in organisations focusing on racism and the criminal justice system and more recently as the co-founder and chair of the Rich Mix Cultural Foundation, the largest multicultural arts centre in the UK.
