Bilal Memon
Fulbright-London School of Economics and Political Science Award
Bilal Memon was raised in Norwalk, Connecticut. He graduated from Brown University in 2022 with a B.A. in Economics and Applied Math. During his time at Brown, he was an assistant to Professor Jesse Shapiro, researching political polarization and governments’ tolerance to protest. He also wrote and edited for the joint RISD-Brown alt weekly, The College Hill Independent, covering antitrust regulation and labor rights. For his senior thesis, he collected novel data from Civil War recruitment lists to analyze how different experiences of enslavement, such as occupation while enslaved or owners’ wealth, impacted how freedmen experienced the transition to freedom.
On his Fulbright, Bilal will continue leveraging data to study the past, particularly the history of slavery. As a master’s student in the Economic History department at LSE, Bilal is excited to pursue such research ideas as the effect of the transition from slavery to indentured servitude in the British Caribbean and a comparative analysis of the effect of malaria on European development in the early modern period.